


Homecoming (and if my wishes came true)

by coalitiongirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Not-Quite-Alternate-Universe - Celebrity, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25719208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coalitiongirl/pseuds/coalitiongirl
Summary: Post-series. After a single night together that ends in mutual heartbreak, Emma flees Storybrooke to live an anonymous, mundane life away from Regina. But it’s next to impossible to escape from memories of a woman who’s just become a celebrity across multiple realms– and after three years away, Emma isn’t even sure if she wants to anymore.
Relationships: Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan
Comments: 194
Kudos: 1160
Collections: Swan Queen Supernova V: Forever Starstruck





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rexinasofia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexinasofia/gifts), [possibilityofmagic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilityofmagic/gifts).
  * Inspired by [homecoming (and if my wishes came true) [fanart]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25749700) by [coffeesometime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesometime/pseuds/coffeesometime). 
  * Inspired by [Homecoming (and if my wishes came true) [Art]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25720252) by [rexinasofia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexinasofia/pseuds/rexinasofia). 



> This is the first fic I've written in nearly a year, and I have to thank a number of people for making it happen, namely the stalwart ladies in the SQSN whatsapp and the other friends who mostly just shook their heads with bemusement as I plowed through this. And special thanks to Bailey (as always) and Sweets (who enabled me and then somehow blindly wound up my artist) and Evie (who grabbed this fic during the free-for-all and NOT **** *** ****** but I couldn't be happier)! The art has blown me away, and I'm so grateful to both of my artists for their gorgeous takes on my story. 
> 
> This story takes place post-series, but you'll only need super basic knowledge of S7 to follow (Henry is married and has a kid, all the realms are united under Queen Regina). I have left out Swan Queen's other two children because they don't work in this story, but I am sure I'll have more opportunity to play with them in the future. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy my nonsense!!

The worst part about a bad breakup– well, not the  _ worst _ , Emma amends, because there’s plenty of  _ worst parts _ to spare– and can she really call it a breakup at all when it had been years of simmering tension that had exploded for only one night? 

_ Anyway _ . The part that royally (no pun intended) sucks about a bad not-exactly-breakup with the Woman Currently Known As Queen Of Universes is that she’s still  _ everywhere _ . She dogs Emma wherever Emma hides, and she doesn’t even have to try to do it. 

She’s on the TV screen when Emma flips it on in the morning in her nondescript Queens ( _ ugh _ , still no pun intended) apartment, chatting with the ladies from The View about the challenges of incorporating democracy into royal charters in Camelot. She’s on a billboard ad on the subway that’s advertising some intra-community efforts between “sister lands” Manhattan and Neverland. There’s a fucking  _ cardboard cutout  _ of her at the drugstore where Emma picks up some Tylenol and a bottle of water and tries to make her headache go away.

Regina is everywhere. Some sadistic soul (and Emma is tempted to blame her mother, who likes to hold up her hands and insist that she isn’t involved in whatever had gone on between them), had decided that Queen Regina should do some branding to help ease the world into accepting the fact that magic is real and is going to bring sporadic crises to the Land Without Magic, formerly. And it’s Emma who’s paying the price.

She buys the Tylenol at the counter, averting her eyes from an issue of  _ Vogue _ in which Regina graces the cover, wearing a tasteful tiara and holding a fireball. There’s a polished smile on her face that harkens back to the days of Madam Mayor, Royal Pain In The Ass, and Emma’s heart twists in her chest. 

“She’s really something, isn’t she?” The cashier gives her a knowing smile. Apparently, Emma hasn’t been averting her eyes very well. “I saw her once in DC a couple of years back. You have no idea the kind of energy she gives off in person. Like… _ tiny _ ,” she says, holding her hand up to show Emma. Emma, who is maybe an inch taller than Regina, is offended. “But like a dynamo. You leave that stadium exhausted but so full of purpose. And, of course, totally in love with her.” 

Emma manages to lift her shoulders in a shrug. There are a dozen responses on her tongue, ranging from melancholy to cutting, but not one of them makes it out. 

The cashier, who is reading much too much into her inability to respond, scans the Tylenol and the water and then grabs the  _ Vogue _ from the rack after Emma’s tapped her card onto the reader. “You take this,” she says, winking at Emma and putting it into her bag. “I’ll take care of it.” 

“Oh. That’s really not– no, I don’t–” Emma stumbles over the words. “I…”  _ Fuck _ . She’d had a solid plan for today, one that had involved coffee and work and a call to Henry and determinedly not thinking about Regina Mills.

Typical Regina, upending her day without a single ounce of effort. There had been a time when that had filled her with annoyance, and a time when it had been met with frustration. Then there had been years when that would make her swell with tired affection for Regina instead. This helpless desolation is new to the past four years.

All that Emma needs to do is to toss the magazine into recycling and forget about it. But the cashier can still see her from the window, and so she walks a few more blocks, hurrying along Seventh Avenue in the throng of people until she can almost forget about the magazine burning a hole through her bag. When she can finally breathe again, she pulls out the magazine and flips to a promised interview with Regina Mills.

It’s easy to skim. Emma has stumbled upon plenty of interviews with Regina over the years, and she’s picked up enough from them to see that this is mostly more of the same. Unity between worlds, Regina’s dark past and shining future, magic, blah, blah, blah. Every interview is of a carefully cultivated image, never the Regina whom Emma had known. It’s fine, even if the photos send pangs through Emma. 

She turns the page, still the masochist she’d become in Storybrooke, and finds a new question.  **You and superstar actress Juliana Gutierrez have been photographed getting cozy in the Enchanted Forest. Any chance there’s new love on the horizon?**

That does it. Emma crumples the page and then dumps the magazine into a trash can before she can look again. She looks up in an attempt to look casually unbothered, and she comes face to face with a massive billboard of Regina’s smile, hovering over Times Square.

_ Dammit.  _

* * *

It’s not like she even  _ likes _ Regina anymore. That night and the aftermath had cured her of that entirely. It’s just muscle memory, really, and the heart is a muscle, too. Years of caring too much about Regina- of obsessing over every emotion hinted at upon her face, of hovering and worrying and the extreme investment that had come with their relationship- it’s instinctive now that Regina evokes all these complicated feelings. It’s why Emma had gotten the hell out of Storybrooke after their fight. She is too often too forgiving when it comes to Regina, and she’s done. 

_ Done  _ means not thinking about Regina while she heads into the office. She’s working a mindless security detail in an office building, long hours and little substantial human contact. The mundane suits her just fine. She’d had enough excitement in Storybrooke to last a lifetime, and she prefers a job where she can smile and greet people and do little more to one with fewer hours where she’d be alone with her thoughts for any given time. 

Henry tries to talk her out of her job once a week. “Don’t you want to make a difference again?” he pleads with her, fully grown and still an idealist. “Imagine what you could do with your magic in this new world.”

But she remains obstinate. “I’m not the savior anymore,” she reminds him. “I’m not needed. There are plenty of magic users to spare these days.” 

“They’re not  _ you _ ,” Henry argues. 

“Exactly.” She says it with satisfaction and a little relief, and Henry heaves a loud sigh. 

“Look, I’m not going to try to push you and Mom to talk again. I get that it’s a...a lost cause,” he admits grudgingly. Progress, at least. It’s taken him years to accept that. “But we miss you. Lucy wants to see you.”

Lucy is always the quickest way to flood Emma with guilt and loss. She has a granddaughter, and she’d missed just as much of her childhood as she had Henry’s. “Do you think you’d be able to come down here for another visit soon? I can maneuver it so I have no shifts next weekend.” Henry doesn’t respond, and Emma bites her lip and tries again. “I’m sorry, Henry. You know I just can’t be around–“  _ Her. _ “Home,” she finishes.

“Yeah,” Henry says, subdued. “We’ll drive down Friday. I think there’s a book signing that my agent was trying to talk me into, anyway. J might be able to come, too.” Emma shifts uncomfortably at that. It’s not fair to be so wary of her daughter-in-law, but Jacinda has always felt distinctly on Regina’s side of…whatever their conflict had been. Every conversation they have, no matter how casual and polite, has always felt shadowed by an unspoken presence that keeps them from venturing any closer. 

Maybe it’s all in Emma’s head. Probably. “I’d love to see her, too,” she says, her voice light. “It’s been too long.”

Mollified, Henry finally changes the subject to a book he’s been offered. “I told them I’d have to think about it,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s something I’m comfortable writing.” 

“What’s the premise?” Emma checks her phone’s clock. Her break is nearly over, but she isn’t ready to hang up yet. Talking to Henry is always a breath of fresh air, a tiny bit of life breathed back into her veins. “Is this another memoir?” 

Henry’s done three memoirs now, each one gobbled up by the populace as though they might be able to know Regina a little better through them. Emma has read them enough to wear down the binding of the book. Henry is  _ good _ , even if his first attempt had crashed and burned. “No. It’s fiction. Another twisted fairytale.” 

_ Ah _ . Those can be loaded, given their histories. He’d turned down  _ Snow White _ twice, but he’d written an anthology of short stories that had been well-received. “Which fairytale are you twisting this time?” 

A pause. “This editor wants a reinterpretation of Peter Pan,” Henry says carefully. “I’m not sure I want to write that.”

Emma says, “Oh.” She can’t think of much more to say than that at first.

“I won’t do it,” Henry says swiftly. “They’ll offer me something else. They always do. I don’t think–” 

“Of course you should do Peter Pan,” Emma interrupts. She twists her fingers around a loose thread on her sweater. “You were in Neverland. You were kidnapped by Peter Pan. Technically, he’s kind of your great-grandfather.” Henry makes a strangled noise over the phone, and Emma bites the bullet. “I hope you’re not turning it down on my account.” 

Henry sounds pained. “ _ Ma _ ,” he says. He’s taken to calling her that, a name that shouldn’t hurt but still does. There’s a distance between them, and she isn’t the  _ Mom _ that she’d been for a few brief, complicated, perfect years. 

Emma does what she can to try to bridge that gap between them, with near-daily calls and fervent support for his writing career. It’s never going to be enough. “I mean it,” she says. “It’s not my story. It’s yours. If you’re tempted to write…to portray Captain Hook in a positive light, I’m not going to be offended. That was years ago. I haven’t even thought of him in months.” She’s startled to discover that that’s true. Her ex-husband is a distant memory at this point, a bad dream that had marred a few of her happiest years. “Hey,” she says, a thought occurring to her. “Why don’t you write a female Captain Hook? Make her some kind of dashing villainess.”

She can almost hear Henry’s grin over the phone, the way he unspools from his tension. “Now  _ that  _ I can work with. You know I’m most comfortable writing about powerful women.”

“They do say to write what you know,” Emma jokes, and her heart seizes for a moment as she thinks of Regina again. Even when Regina isn’t on every sign around her, she still consumes Emma’s thoughts far too often. 

Henry is silent for a moment. “Ma?” he says, and his voice is low. Emma knows what he’s going to ask before he speaks another word.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I just– I have to go. My break’s over.” 

She hangs up the phone before he can prod a little more, and she takes a breath and heads back out to the office lobby.

* * *

It was always bound to go wrong between the two of them. Emma had known it, had understood it, and had still been utterly unprepared when it had fallen apart. They’d always been too similar, too prone to anger, like two fuses that had only needed to be lit. They’d been explosive when they’d first fought, and they’d only tempered it because of their shared love for their son. 

Not each other. Never each other.

They’d kissed more than that one night. It had been a dance with danger, with something forbidden that they’d been unable to resist. Emma remembers their first kiss like sparks of fire, like something dangerous and soaked in resentment and hatred. The curse hadn’t even been broken, and it might have devolved into something more if they hadn’t been interrupted by Mary Margaret. 

They hadn’t kissed again until Neverland, when it had been quiet and desperate one night, two mothers terrified for their son. It had been easy, kissing Regina. Comforting. They’d kissed again after saving Henry out of sheer exhilaration, and it had been…nice. Good. Like something had finally felt okay in this topsy-turvy world.

After that, after one last kiss as the billowing clouds of Pan’s curse had begun to consume the town, the kisses hadn’t stopped. They’d always been…tentative, light, like something that could be passed as familial instead of something more. Lips pressed to the corner of a mouth. Their foreheads together and their lips barely grazing each other’s. Regina had found some damned soulmate to date, and Emma had taken that as her cue to finally settle for the man who’d been chasing her.

They’d never quite stopped the kissing altogether when they’d been with other people. It had had the veneer of casualness, of a hello or goodbye like a kiss on the cheek (but they would start on the cheek and then linger just a little too long at the lips). They’d never done it publicly, though. Even as they’d justified them away, they’d known to never be seen.

When Emma thinks back to that time, it’s like scratching at an open wound. Every one of those kisses had been a flash of comfort and agony, a brief moment of respite in the middle of a crisis. Emma had lived for every one, had drawn more strength from them than from anything she could admit publicly. Regina’s eyes on hers, her smile warm, her lips brushing Emma’s…it had kept her going. 

_ God _ , she’d loved Regina so much. There had been that brief time when she’d been the Dark One and had felt unburdened by their ordinary constraints, when she’d backed Regina against the door of her house and kissed her like she’d meant it.  _ No, no _ , Regina had whispered against her lips.  _ You won’t want this when you’re…  _

But she had. She always had, and she’d desperately taken what little bits of Regina that the other woman had offered, every single time. Even as she’d done what she could to appease Hook– even once he’d  _ proposed _ – she’d still clung to Regina in secret moments, and then had smiled and pretended that they’d never happened at all. In public, they’d always keep a cautious distance, standing far enough apart that they wouldn’t forget propriety for habit.

On the day of her wedding, Emma had told Regina that she’d loved her. The kisses had been longer, more urgent, and Emma had whispered it against her lips when she’d been unable to hold it back.  _ Give me a reason to stay, _ she’d thought and never said, just before she’d been about to walk down the aisle.  _ Give me a reason to be yours instead _ .

And Regina had only said,  _ Shh. It’s okay. Go marry him.  _ Emma had borne the rejection with a smile that had stretched painfully across her face, and she’d exhaled. It would be okay. It had always been okay for them before then. Emma’s confession wouldn’t interfere with their relationship.

Except that the kisses had waned after that, as Emma had struggled to hold together a marriage in which she’d been in love with someone else. Hook had resented her for it, had sensed exactly what it had been that had kept her from him. They’d fought and they’d made up and Emma had spent more time silently apologizing for her feelings for Regina, had drifted apart from Regina in her quest to be who Hook had needed her to be. They’d been friends still, but there had been little more comfort, few more moments when it had been just them and their connection had been alive and strong.

Then Regina had  _ left _ , left for a lifetime with Henry that Emma had missed while she’d been trying to mend her marriage, and she’d returned only to join together whole universes. Not for Emma. It had been the nail on the coffin of Emma’s relationship with Hook, which had been a relief to her. He’d been gone before Regina had been crowned queen.

There had been dancing that night, a traditional ball that had been covered by fascinated media circuits that were just beginning to open up to the idea of what these new universes had had to offer. Emma remembers dancing with Regina, remembers the warmth of wrapping Regina in her arms, remembers her glittering smile and the way her eyes had gleamed in the moonlight. She remembers a quiet moment, the two of them stealing away into the night, and she remembers kisses that had become more and more desperate as they’d pushed away too many years apart.

They’d finally undressed each other with trembling hands that hadn’t wanted to wait, had torn at intricate buttons and lacing in Regina’s master bedroom until they’d been finally together. Emma had lost herself in Regina for the first time, had come alive like never before, and she’d cried and laughed and been at peace for the first time in years. 

And in the morning, they’d awakened lying together, legs tangled and Regina’s head tucked under Emma’s chin. There hadn’t been any awkwardness, just rueful acknowledgement that this had all been a long time coming, and then… 

Then Regina had ruined it all with four simple words.  _ I’ve always loved you _ , she’d admitted in a gentle, affectionate tone, and Emma had stared at her in betrayal and loss. Regina hadn’t seen, had expounded on years spent kissing Emma and desperately missing her, had pinpointed the moment that she’d fell in love with Emma to long before Neverland, and she’d gone on and on until Emma had stumbled off the bed and away from her.

_ Years _ . Years and years of wasted time, of Regina turning her down more than once, of Emma in a hopeless marriage because Regina hadn’t told her how she’d felt. Emma had  _ begged  _ Regina to give her a reason not to marry Hook. Emma had kissed her like she’d meant it and Regina had never once given her any indication that she’d felt the same way.

Regina had never wanted her until  _ then _ , until she’d been free of commitments and not under the influence of the Dark One and easy to have. Emma had never been someone Regina would fight for, and Emma had only begun to realize it in that moment.

They’d fought. They’ve always been doomed to fight, had been prophesied to be at war. They’d argued about who’d been at fault–  _ you only wanted me when you wanted to get away from him _ , Regina had said, and Emma had been livid– and their arguments had risen and risen until they’d reached a fatal crescendo. 

Something about being in love that Emma had learned: you know what will hurt the other person intimately, what will destroy them to hear, and you don’t use it because of that very reason. 

That morning, they’d destroyed each other, and they’d never been the same.

Emma had stayed in Storybrooke for one miserable year after that, had fought with Regina like they’d once fought during the curse, had made everyone around them uncomfortable and scrambling for a side. They’d been incapable of being alone together, had avoided spending time together. The friendship had broken, but not in one fell swoop. Instead, there had been a year of cracks, each more vicious than the next, until the thing that had been their friendship had been hacked to pieces, irreparable. 

On the one-year anniversary of the night when they’d begun their spiral toward destruction, Emma had picked up and left town for the anonymity of New York. Her family had found her, of course– Regina must have helped, albeit reluctantly– and they hadn’t let her disappear forever. She visits her mother and father in the Enchanted Forest, sees Henry and Lucy on weekends, and even writes the occasional text to check in on Robin and Alice. She doesn’t go home, though it feels sometimes like it’s followed her here.

It’s been three years, and Emma Swan still can’t escape the specter of Regina Mills.

* * *

The days crawl by until Henry comes. One thing that Emma had searched for in a job had been predictability. She’d spent too many years waiting for the other shoe to drop that it’s a relief to live this kind of ordinary existence, free of excitement or terror. She makes enough money to afford a one-bedroom in Queens in a so-so neighborhood and to support her eating habits. She’s never going to make a splash here, never going to save anyone’s life, and she thinks that it’s probably for the best. She’s been just as good at making messes as she’s been at fixing them up over the years.

But without being the savior– without having people around to help– life has been strangely empty. She has little purpose when she isn’t with her family now, when she isn’t working toward something. There’s nothing to strive for in her everyday life, and as much as she insists that she wants it this way, she finds herself longing for the weekend when it’ll all be disrupted. 

Henry doesn’t stay in her tiny apartment when he’s in town. Instead, he gets a hotel room in Manhattan for himself and Jacinda and drives Lucy to Queens to stay on Emma’s futon. “You put up my pictures!” Lucy says, looking up at them with obvious delight. Lucy has sent her paintings, landscapes of her childhood home in another realm and a detailed painting of the Seattle skyline. Emma had ordered the material to mount them as canvases, and they dot her little living room. 

There is one of the two of them. Lucy insists that she can’t do faces so they’re sitting together, their backs to the viewer, staring out the window of this very apartment. “Of course I put them up,” Emma says, grinning at her. “They’re going to be worth millions someday. Original Lucy Millses.” 

Lucy makes a face, too old now to be charmed by that. “Come on. I’m not even in the top tier in my art class.” 

“ _ Billions _ ,” Emma amends, and Lucy throws herself onto the couch with a loud sigh and turns the TV to Netflix. 

Henry and Jacinda watch them from the kitchen, Henry with warm eyes and Jacinda with an unreadable expression. “It means a lot to her that you put them up,” she murmurs to Emma once Henry has joined Lucy on the couch. Her son and granddaughter are poring over a takeout menu with critical eyes, and Emma has to drag her eyes away from them to respond to Jacinda. 

Jacinda always chooses her words carefully around Emma, and Emma can sense it with every intake of breath. “They’re amazing. Of course I’d put them up,” she says, and she has to lighten her voice, free it of defensiveness. “I have extra material, if she wants to make a few more into canvases.”

“That’s very thoughtful. Usually we give–” Jacinda stumbles over her words. “We usually have it done by magic,” she says, her eyes flickering back to Henry and Lucy. 

Emma refuses to acknowledge what she’d left unsaid. “She’s great,” she says instead. “They should write and illustrate a book together.” 

“They’ve talked about it,” Jacinda says, and this time, her smile is undeniably real. “They want to collaborate on a children’s book of fairytales. Not like the one Henry grew up with.” She shakes her head affectionately. “Henry never really considers branching out from his usual.” 

“That’s great. There are so many–” It’s Emma’s turn to stumble over her words as a familiar face appears on the television screen. 

Lucy has perked up. “Hey,  _ Realm-Jumping House Hunting _ ! I didn’t realize they were releasing a new season. Did you know Grandma was hosting an episode for that new apartment complex they’re building in the Land Without Color?”

Henry snorts. “It’s because no one’s going to live there without Mom shilling for it. The buyers want it prepped by Halloween because they think they might make some money off haunted houses, but there’s no way people will willingly choose to move there.” Onscreen, Regina is talking about the opportunities available in a realm where science and magic are enmeshed.

“Researchers have described their work here as a little bit like science fiction. This is cutting-edge technology.” She walks through a spacious but forbidding-looking home in shades of black and white. She’s the only thing in color on the screen, and she has more of a glow than usual because of it. “Don’t let the lack of hue here lead to a lack of you.” It’s a terrible catchphrase, and Regina laughs at it while Jacinda winces, white teeth gleaming as she rolls her eyes. “They made me say that,” Regina says, lowering her voice conspiratorially as she winks at the camera.

Emma can’t watch anymore. “I’m going to– I think it’ll probably take less time if I pick up the food,” she says abruptly, seizing the menu from Henry’s hands. He looks contrite, but Emma turns away before he can say something in front of Lucy. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she promises. “I just need some air.” 

She makes it out the door and down the hall before the door opens behind her and Jacinda stands in the doorway. “Emma–” she starts, and then hesitates.

They stare at each other, frozen across the hallway, Jacinda’s gaze piercing and Emma’s defiant. She doesn’t want to have this conversation, not again. Henry used to joke about being the son of divorced parents, back when Emma had first left to New York, and it had always been followed by gentle prodding that had sounded as much like Jacinda as it had Henry. 

Henry hasn’t picked a side in this war, nor has Lucy, and they feel like the only people in the world who still see her and not just Regina’s anger. Jacinda sees something else, and Emma dreads the day that she finds out what it is.

“I’ve got to go,” she says, jerking her thumb toward the elevator. “Tell Henry I fully expect a tip when I get back.” 

She leaves Jacinda watching her in the hallway, her eyes searching and very, very sad.

* * *

At night, they go out walking through a nearby park before splitting up at the train station. There’s a massive graffiti portrait of Regina on the wall of a convenience store next to the subway entrance. Emma notices it because she can’t help it, because she can never help noticing the images of Regina that follow her everywhere. The graffiti artist had added a crown to hover over Regina’s head, and Henry blinks and says, “Huh. Is that supposed to be…?” His voice trails off.

“I don’t see any resemblance,” Emma says flatly. But Henry holds her tightly before he goes up the steps to the station as though he knows that she needs it. 

Jacinda pecks her cheek and smiles awkwardly at her. “Have a good night with Lucy, okay?” Her eyes narrow as she wraps an arm around Lucy to tug her close. “Just be warned– she snores when she’s got a cold.” 

“I do not!” Lucy protests. But she does, of course, and her light snores fill Emma’s room. They’re soothing, somehow. Emma’s missed sharing a room with someone. Back when Henry had been a kid, he’d slept in her room in the loft. He’d snored, too. It must not be genetic, though, because Emma doesn’t, Neal hadn’t, but Regina had also…

She bites her lip and stares at the ceiling, willing away thoughts of Regina. That last bitter year had left her scarred, unwilling to even consider working things out. If she never sees Regina again, she’ll be content. 

Naturally, her dreams are of Regina, shining in the greys of the Land Without Color, and she wakes up frustrated and irritable. She tucks it away for Lucy, who is spending the day with her. “Have you ever been to the Hall of Science?” she asks. There have been a bevy of trips over the past few years, everywhere in the city that Emma can find that might entertain a twelve-to-fourteen-year-old.

“The place where they dissect cow eyeballs?” Lucy wrinkles her nose. “It was the first place you ever brought me here.” She brightens. “Can we go to the Met again?” 

“Definitely.” Henry claims that it’s Emma’s influence that has made Lucy so enthusiastic about painting. Which is hilarious to Emma, who’s never drawn so much as a passable stick figure. But New York is full of art museums, and Lucy has been wandering to them from the start, Emma following bemusedly behind her. “Nothing you want to do without your boring adult parents around?”

Lucy smirks at her. “Spoken like a true Boring Adult.” Emma gasps in outrage. “My dad is doing that book signing today so Mom might wind up joining us anyway. They go on  _ forever _ .” She rolls her eyes. “The worst part is listening to him complain about how much his hand hurts after. As if I don’t do seven hours of notes in school every day.” 

“Wimp,” Emma says, nodding her head sagely. A thought occurs to her. “Hey, if we’re already in Manhattan, why don’t we drop by your dad? We can wait on line like real fans.” 

Lucy brightens at the idea, then dims. “Can’t,” she says. “Not for this one.” 

Emma’s brow furrows. “Why not?” 

Lucy shrugs, unwilling to answer, and Emma waits. Finally, Lucy sighs. “Dad’s agent talked Grandma into doing this signing with him.” 

“Oh.” Emma doesn’t know what Lucy knows about…whatever this is. They’ve always been careful to protect her from family conflicts, to make sure that she knows that she has a family that loves her and to keep her out of drama. But from the way that Lucy is peering at her from the corner of her eye, she suspects that Lucy must have a clue. “I didn’t know your grandmother was in New York.” 

Lucy shrugs. “She doesn’t come here a lot. Dad says that Grandma and New York City don’t mix.” She peeks at Emma again, through her eyelashes. “But he really meant Grandma and you, didn’t he?” 

Emma avoids her gaze. Lucy has her mother’s stare, penetrating and gentle, and she sees too much with those sharp eyes. “It’s complicated,” she says finally. “Your other grandmother and I are…well, some people just don’t mesh, you know?”

Lucy eyes her again. “Yeah. You give up your soul for lots of people you don’t mesh with?” 

Emma is  _ deeply  _ flustered. “I didn’t– that wasn’t– that was for the town!” she splutters. She should have expected Henry’s kid to be as much of a smartass as he’d been. Lucy just smirks at her, wiggling a finger around her long hair. She’s getting taller, growing into herself, and Emma’s noticed a lot more boys looking her way today than she had on Lucy’s last visit. Jacinda has been talking about a quinceañera for Lucy for her fifteenth, another milestone toward adulthood.

Emma indulges herself by contemplating locking Lucy in a tower for a decade or two. Maybe there’s something to that, after all.

Lucy is also getting dangerously close to Emma’s height. Emma chooses not to reflect on that. “The  _ point _ is,” she says, jabbing a finger in Lucy’s face. “I don’t really care what your other grandmother is up to. Sometimes there’s just going to be someone connected to other people in your life who just isn’t a priority to you. I’m glad that your grandma is good to you. I just…” 

“She wasn’t good to you. That’s what Mom says,” Lucy says, her eyes intent on Emma. They’re nearly at the station, waiting for the next train into Manhattan. “Not when I’m supposed to hear, but you’d be surprised at what people say when your AirPods are in and disconnected.” 

Emma blinks at her. “Your mother… _ Jacinda  _ said that?” That comes as a surprise. “No,” she says quickly. “It’s not that she wasn’t…we just weren’t good to each other. It’s better that we don’t see each other anymore. We just hurt each other.” 

“Hm.” The train comes and they squeeze in, Lucy seated at an end and Emma leaning against the pole next to her. There’s a girl on the train holding a backpack with a picture of Regina emblazoned upon it, and Emma closes her eyes for a moment. 

When she opens them and turns back to Lucy, Lucy tilts her head and says, “The tabloids are wrong. Juliana is shadowing Grandma for a new movie where she’s going to play Queen Regina. They aren’t dating.” She considers, her eyes locked on Emma’s, and she adds, her voice grave, “Yet.”

“Lucy–” She’d been through this with Henry already, and she suspects that she’s going to have to sit Lucy down sometime soon and talk frankly to her. She doesn’t  _ care  _ who Regina’s dating or almost dating. That ship has long since sailed, and Lucy needs to understand that.

But not today. Not one of Emma’s precious few days with her family. “Good for her,” Emma says instead, and she turns to stare at the little girl’s backpack again, this time in defiance.

* * *

Henry leaves on Sunday morning, and Emma returns to the dull reality of a life she’d chosen. Morning: the train into the city, Starbucks and a muffin, a walk to the office building where she works. Greeting the suited men and women who enter and pretending to remember their names until they sign in. A lunch break spent calling Henry or Snow and chatting for a few minutes before she heads back in. The walk home after dark, shivering in the night air and watching every man who walks past her with wary eyes. 

Lucy emails her a picture of her newest painting. She’s tried doing a self-portrait, and it’s not perfect but it captures a certain light in Lucy’s eye. Snow somehow manages to get a package delivered from the Enchanted Forest to Queens. It’s packed with food and some knitting (Snow is trying unsuccessfully to pick up a hobby) and a little wooden figure waving a sword on a horse (Snow’s next attempt at a hobby, much better than the first). There’s nothing in Snow’s package that she needs, but it’s a quiet reminder that Emma is cared for, and Emma blinks back tears and tries the chocolate chip cookies.

There are also a few apple turnovers, and Emma knows at once that they’re Regina’s recipe, and that Snow can’t help but meddle sometimes. 

She’s never understood how it could go so badly between them. “Regina tried to kill me, and look at us now!” she’d say cheerily after a particularly vicious fight. “You two have been friends for a lot longer than you’ve been sniping at each other.” 

Snow knows about that night after the coronation. They all know: Snow, Henry, David, Jacinda, half of the people who’d been there. Emma and Regina hadn’t been subtle, in the way that two people who are sure of each other had been. But none of their observers grasp why it had still gone wrong, and Emma isn’t volunteering that information.

When she thinks about it for too long, the emotions rise up and clog in her throat. There had been so much wasted time. So many years spent just believing that Regina hadn’t had any…but instead, Regina, who’d loved so hard once that it had destroyed an entire realm, just hadn’t loved Emma enough to try.

She shakes her head, dismissing that pesky grief that wells up. It’s absurd to dwell on what’s long over, what’s been replaced long ago with anger and bitterness. Storybrooke feels more like a movie she’d watched once and can’t quite remember than a real chapter of her life. 

In defiance, she grabs an apple turnover and brings it on the train with her that morning. She won’t be leashed to the past, to people she’d left behind for a reason. She won’t let the past consume her like it used to when she’d been a kid. She can’t.

She finishes the turnover on the train, and stops at the Starbucks across from the train station to grab her usual. Her cup is marked  _ Edna _ , and she sighs and takes it before she heads down Seventh Avenue toward her workplace.

Up ahead, there’s a bit of a commotion, a camera crew and a man with a loud voice walking up to people. Emma can’t quite make out what he’s saying, but she recognizes him. He’s got some kind of show where he wanders the city, sometimes with celebrities, and asks passersby related questions.

She considers turning at the corner and avoiding him, but she’s already running late, and she can ignore a stranger in New York like the best of them. She continues down the street, eyes focused straight ahead and sending off waves of  _ stay-away _ as she moves.

The show host doesn’t sense it or doesn’t care, because he finishes his interrogation of the man in front of Emma and makes a beeline for her. “Edna!” he says, reading the name off her cup. “Edna, are you familiar with the queen of all realms?” Emma gapes at him, startled enough by the question that she forgets to ignore him. 

The host bounces on his feet and seizes the arm of a woman whom Emma hadn’t noticed before. “Edna, for one dollar, would you tell Her Majesty that this bow tie makes her look beautiful?” 

_ Oh. _ Of all the idiotic, impossible coincidences…it can’t be. Emma’s mouth goes dry, and she stares in disbelief at the woman that the host has pulled forward. The woman is laughing at the host, rolling her eyes, and she is in fact wearing an enormous bow tie with multicolored polka dots at the top of her immaculately tailored suit. The host turns back to Emma. “Well? She’s beautiful, she’s powerful, she could set you on fire with her mind. Tell her that this lovely bow tie brings out the color of her eyes. Tell her that she’s a vision in circus clown yellow. A dollar is on the line!” 

Emma can’t move, can’t speak, can’t think to do anything but stare at the woman in question. And Regina finally turns from the host to look at his latest victim, and she starts so violently that she elbows the host in the gut. “Ow!” he says. “She’s also got a pretty knobbly elbow. You can tell her about that, too.” 

Emma ignores him. It had been easier than expected until now, moving on from Regina. Sure, Regina had been plastered all over New York City, but it had also just been images, pictures and videos and never the real thing. Regina playing an artificial celebrity is someone Emma can keep her distance from. Regina, the real deal, is something else entirely. 

Regina opens her mouth, then shuts it, a wave of pain crossing her face. Emma hurts to have put it there, even as she hurts to see Regina at all. The host says, “Okay, we don’t have all day, moving on! Let’s go!” He starts toward the next person eyeing him from the other end of the sidewalk, then hesitates when Regina doesn’t move.

Emma swallows. Regina watches her, eyes soft and her stature exactly as small as that damned cashier had described her the other day. Emma doesn’t know how she’d forgotten that about Regina. But then, she’d let herself forget plenty. Regina had been built up to be larger than life in her mind, had been all about the bitterness instead of all the magic that had come before.

She clears her throat, and she says, her voice strangled, “That bow tie makes you look beautiful.” It emerges soft, pained, and deeply heartfelt. Regina could wear a trash can on her head and still look beautiful. 

Regina stands still, frozen in place, and even the host is beginning to look uncertain. “Ms. Mills?” he prompts. People are taking notice, are snapping pictures, and Emma still can’t think to take shelter from this sudden attention. 

Regina whispers, “Emma?” 

The sound of her name from Regina’s lips jolts Emma back to reality. She stumbles back a few steps and then turns on her heel and runs, away from the cameras and away from the street and far, far away from Regina Mills. 


	2. Chapter 2

She gets a few odd looks from some of her regulars that afternoon, and she refuses to think about that until she’s safely home for the night. She flips on the news while she checks the messages that she’d missed during the day.

There are more messages than usual, a few from Snow and David  _ just checking in _ , as though that’s something easy to do when you live in a castle with no cell phone towers. Henry has sent her a flurry of voice notes that she doesn’t listen to yet, and Lucy has texted her a full rainbow of hearts. Had Regina really told them all about their encounter?

She stares at the messages, stymied, and she’s about to listen to Henry’s voice notes when she hears Regina’s name on the television.

“–a bit of a scare for New Yorkers,” the female announcer says brightly, and Emma looks up and groans. The screen is displaying shaky iPhone footage of Regina, her eyes wide and vulnerable as she stares at a blonde woman whose face isn’t visible in the video. “No one can identify the woman who’d confronted the queen, but our sources say that Her Majesty was visibly shaken by what the woman had said. The office of the Good Queen of the Realms has refused to comment on the incident, but if this woman could stop Regina Mills in her tracks, who knows what else she might be capable of?” The footage ends with Emma twisting away from Regina, her face hardly a blur as she moves. “Let’s go to our magic experts, who can tell us the odds of New York weathering a paranormal attack.” 

Emma turns off the TV, shaking, and listens to Henry’s voice notes.

“Ma?” His voice is strained, and she can almost feel the worry seeping from him. “I saw the news. Hang in there, okay? I’m driving down tonight.” 

A second voice note. “Mom isn’t picking up the phone. I guess it’s too much to expect that you two might have…” He stops, and the third voice note starts. “Sorry. Dumb joke. Look, I swear that I didn’t make this happen. I don’t know how it…Mom’s done that show a dozen times. She claims that it demystifies the Good Queen, but I always just kind of assumed that she liked hanging out with the host. I guess it was only a matter of time–” 

And a fourth. “Okay. I’ll see you later.” 

Emma records her own voice note, clearing her throat and doing it twice before her voice can sound as breezy as she wants it to. “I don’t need you to come down here,” she says, trying to infuse a little bit of amusement into her voice. “I saw your mother, that’s all.” She bites her lip. “She’s smaller than I remember,” she blurts out. Her finger slips and the message sends.

It would probably be understandable if she bangs her head repeatedly on the table now, wouldn’t it? She drums her fingers on the table instead, staring blankly at the dark TV screen. She feels restless, energized like she hasn’t felt in years, and she knows and hates the cause of it. Nothing has changed. There’s still far too much hurt and anger between them to ever… 

She picks up the phone and scrolls to the number labeled  _ Mom _ , then down to  _ Zelena _ for an absolutely mad instant, then back up. Her thumb pauses on  _ Jacinda _ and she presses the name. 

Jacinda picks up. Without preamble, she says, “She’s staying at the Park Hyatt by Central Park until Wednesday. There’s a benefit she’s doing at Tavern on the Green tomorrow night for The Foundling– the foster care organization? And then she’s supposed to be doing a presentation at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan the next day.” 

Emma’s hand tightens on her phone. “I didn’t want to hear any of that.” 

“Yes, you did,” Jacinda says, and she sounds tired. “Look, I’m not going to give you big speeches about happily ever after. That’s all your side of the family. I’m just telling you where she is. Okay?” 

“I don’t–” But Jacinda has already hung up.

* * *

Jacinda had known exactly what buttons to push, even without pushing a single one, and Emma is left at a loss. Now that she knows where Regina’s staying– and just a fifteen-minute walk from Emma’s office building– it’s next to impossible to stop herself from walking a few extra blocks the next afternoon to the Park Hyatt.

She lingers in front for a few minutes, her eyes flickering up toward the rows and rows of windows above her, and a doorman eyes her with suspicion and then whispers something to a security guard. Emma makes a quick getaway, intending to go straight home. 

Instead, her feet carry her toward Central Park and Tavern on the Green. It’s an indoor/outdoor seating restaurant in the park, big enough for hundreds of people to attend this benefit along with Regina. She has no reason to stick around until evening, but she finds reasons to sit outside the restaurant, to scan her phone as she enjoys the crisp winter air. 

It’s not that she wants to see Regina, or that she’d have anything to say once she does. It’s only that she needs to see her, that she’s been given a taste of an old addiction and now she can’t let it go. A flood of unfinished business has swept over her, carrying her away, and Emma doesn’t know how to go back to the dull and the quiet again. 

Maybe they just need to speak once. Maybe that will settle Emma’s restless mind.

It’s close to nightfall when the wave of people entering the restaurant begins. Emma sits on her bench, glancing at the crowd with as much disinterest as she can paint onto her face. She recognizes a few of the guests– socialites, businessmen, the kind of people who trickle into the little bit of news that she watches. And there are a few others: the kind of socialites she knows well, in princess-poofy ballgowns and old-fashioned tailcoats and wearing light tiaras on their heads. The realms have bled into each other, and the elite have been quickest to adapt.

And finally, Emma spots a large security detail that she recognizes from the news. Regina’s bodyguards, a dozen of whom would be no match against Regina herself. They’d fought about it once, during the rare moment years ago when they’d managed to get along. 

They’d been lingering outside of Town Hall before a group of ambassadors had arrived from a hostile realm, and Emma had quietly contracted a security detail via the sheriff’s department. Regina had scoffed, had been sure that she could handle any assailant. Emma had taken out her gun.  _ And what do you do if you don’t notice them in time? If you’re so busy reaching out to the people that you miss the one who wants to kill you?  _

Regina had snapped something nasty, but she’d taken the security detail that had been assigned to her. There had been a second, smaller group that had been offered to Emma, but Emma had felt comfortable turning them down. She’d managed to slip under the radar. Storybrooke still knows her, but there are few places beyond their town where there’s been even a whisper of a one-time savior. 

And Regina still has the security detail, one good thing Emma had managed to do in that last year before she’d left. Emma starts forward, her eyes on the dark-haired figure barely visible in the middle of the bodyguards. Her heart pounds, and she’s at a loss what she might say when she comes face-to-face with Regina.

She doesn’t get that opportunity. Instead, a security guard blocks her way. “You can’t go past this line,” he grunts. Regina doesn’t notice her.

Regina– Emma notices suddenly– is accompanied by an auburn-haired figure that is almost definitely Juliana Gutierrez. She feels sick. “I’m a friend of Regina’s,” she says hoarsely.

The guard laughs. “Sure you are. Line up for an autograph tomorrow at the museum, lady. This is an exclusive party.” 

“No, I–” For a moment, she contemplates shouting Regina’s name. There is a lifetime of shouted names between them,  _ Regina!  _ and _ Emma!  _ their history and their battle cries. She knows Regina would turn if she heard Emma’s voice, and then…

And then what? She doesn’t know. She still doesn’t know what she’d say to Regina or why she’s here in the first place. There has always been an invisible thread between them, a bond that has kept them linked inexorably that years apart can’t change. Emma had caught a single glimpse of Regina and she’s become a helpless victim to their bond, desperate to see her again.

But then again, she’d always been a lot more desperate for Regina than Regina, apparently, had been for her. 

She takes a step back, watching from afar as Regina slips an arm into Juliana’s and murmurs something in her ear. They don’t turn, don’t notice a woman staring at them with hollow eyes, and Emma stumbles back and sits on her bench instead. 

That last year between them had been one of the worst years of a less than auspicious life. She’d been surrounded by family and free of a marriage that she’d hated, and still, she’d been walking on eggshells. Every encounter with Regina would end with one of them saying something cutting, with Emma frustrated and desolate even when she’d been the one to land a blow. They had fallen into a pit and neither of them had been able to figure out how to get out of it. Emma doesn’t even know if they’d wanted to get out at all. She’d been so angry, and it had hurt each day a little more.

She remembers the odd peaceful moment, tiny scenes from a different time in which they’d been able to put aside their resentment. Regina asleep on the couch with Lucy one afternoon after a long day negotiating peace between two kingdoms, when Emma had walked in to pick up Lucy and had felt heart-wrenching adoration for them both. She remembers laying a blanket down over them and then sitting on the floor beside them, her head resting against the side of the couch. Regina had awakened after a few minutes, and she’d run gentle fingers through Emma’s hair as they’d conversed in whispers so as not to awaken Lucy.

Emma had driven patrols most nights, unenthusiastic about coming home to an empty house and very aware that Regina would leave work later and later, would send home her security detail and tell them that she’d teleport home. Instead, she would walk alone through the streets of Storybrooke, reveling in the quiet around her, and Emma would drive down the street one block back, watching her safely home. Regina had seen once, had waited for her, and they’d fallen into a silent routine: Regina lingering at the door to Town Hall, Emma pulling up, and a drive in silence with Regina’s head resting against the back of the passenger seat, eyes focused out the window or– on the boldest nights– on Emma as she’d driven.

There had been a moment at Alice and Robin’s wedding when Emma had seen Alice’s father and felt sick, had fled the area of the park where the wedding was being held and slumped on the ground against a tree. Regina had been waiting for it– had been watching her as soon as she’d entered– and she’d followed Emma to the tree and sat down beside her. Their hands had tangled and Regina had squeezed Emma’s and they had been quiet, afraid of what might happen if they’d dared to speak to each other.

They’d been best that year when they hadn’t spoken, when they hadn’t looked at each other, when the tension that had buzzed between them wasn’t faced head-on. The rest of the time had been angry and nasty and sad, raised voices and low jabs and Emma squeezing her fists so tightly that she’d leave marks in her palm each incident. 

There is far too much that they haven’t worked through, and Emma doesn’t know why she’d come here in the first place. The days of being glued to Regina are over, and she’d cut through the ties that bind them when she’d left town. She isn’t doing this again. 

It’s beginning to feel warm at the park, unusually so for October, and Emma retreats and heads home.

* * *

By the next morning, she’s resolved to stay far away from Regina. And she absolutely stays away from her while she gets dressed, gets on the train, and then gets off near the Children’s Museum of Manhattan and calls in sick to work.

Right around then, it gets a little dicey.

There’s a line winding out the door for entry, crowds of kids all the way down the ramp and the street, and Emma glances around and feels distinctly creepy. At least she isn’t the only forty-year-old on the line. But most have brought along children and grandchildren, and Emma tries subtly to stand close to one of the kids and look a little less out of place.

The boy’s mother tugs him close to her and gives her a dirty look. “This event is for children,” she says. 

“Yeah, I know.” Emma sticks her gloved hands into the pockets of her jacket. “I’m not…I just needed to see…” 

The woman’s glare gets a little stronger. Emma says helplessly, “I’m not a stalker or anything. I don’t even know why I’m here.” 

As if on cue, the security guard from last night walks past her and guffaws. “You really did come back after last night, didn’t you?” The woman is beginning to look alarmed. Emma winces. 

It’s a relief when she finally makes it inside. There are facilitators walking through the museum, urging along stragglers so it doesn’t get too crowded. Emma pays the fee to enter and gets another side-eye from the man behind the desk. “I’m meeting my son inside,” she lies. The woman in front of her, now at the next receptionist, looks scandalized. 

There is no autograph line yet, just a big room that’s been emptied out so Regina can sit on a little chair and read to the kids. They drift to her out of curiosity and stick around when she puts on voices, dozens of little faces enthralled by her. Emma hangs back and drinks her in, out of her line of sight.

She’s still so intoxicatingly  _ Regina _ , even after three years. Her eyes light up around the children, and she beams at them, in her element. Regina is a stellar mayor and has done incredible work as a public figure and leader of the realms, sure, but Emma’s always suspected that she might have a second calling as a preschool teacher. She’s so good with them, and it floods Emma with warmth to see it.

Regina doesn’t see her, and she doesn’t see her after the reading, either, when she drops to the floor and helps a crowd of kids who are trying to build a castle with Brain Blox. Emma slips out of the room, uncomfortable and out of place, and she finds a stairwell to take shelter in for a while.

She checks her phone and finds a text from Jacinda from hours ago.  _ Forgot to mention that there’s a thing for kids at the museum first but I think an autograph table after lunch for everyone? Don’t be skeevy and go early. _

Emma closes her eyes. Counts to ten internally. Texts back,  _ Don’t worry, I’m not planning on going at all _ . Leaves the museum. 

She returns at a more sedate three pm, with a much longer and older line of people winding down the block. This time, the line moves quickly, a separation set up so people can enter and leave with just a brief moment to get their photos and books and papers signed.  _ Wait _ . Emma hadn’t thought to bring anything to sign. She fishes through her pockets, retrieving a wrinkled receipt.

_ Okay _ . She holds onto her receipt, getting a few dirty looks from the people around her. “Show some respect,” someone mutters. Emma rolls her eyes, too nauseous to speak.

There are cameras all around, the press mingling near the autograph table, and Regina’s energy from earlier is fading. Emma can tell, even if it’s just from the pasted smile that might have looked natural to someone who doesn’t know Regina well. She greets each visitor and signs for them, and her head droops at least twice before she catches herself. Emma glances uneasily behind her, checking out the line that still goes out the door, and Regina whispers something to one of her security guards.

“Okay!” he barks out. “We’re through. Next ten people and then we call it a day.” He moves through the line, counting until he hits the person in front of Emma, and Emma hesitates. She’s going to be shut out, she realizes, and there’s only one possible way to stop that from happening.

Well, two, but she’s loath to call Regina’s name. Technically, she’d decided not to use magic anymore once she’d moved away from Storybrooke, even if the Land Without Magic’s seal seems to have been broken. She’d been the Dark One for long enough that all she has to do is wiggle a few fingers and the security guard pauses, his mind suddenly muddled, and says, “Ten,” without counting the person in front of her.

Emma exhales. The line seems to slow to a crawl as disappointed well-wishers are hustled out of the museum, Regina enlivened enough by an end in sight that she chats a little more with each person in front of her. The media lingers, waiting for their moments with the Good Queen, and Emma wishes desperately for a coat that might hide her face from them when she sees Regina.

But she’s only got a brown jacket, and she ducks her head as the person in front of her finally finishes with Regina. “It’s an honor to meet you,” the woman is saying, holding on tightly to Regina’s gloved hand. “You’ve brought magic into all of our lives. It’s been…” She’s tearful, emotional, and Emma is thrust back into  _ saviorhood _ and the burden and gift it had been for her. Regina handles it with the grace that Emma had never managed– but then, Regina had  _ wanted  _ to save people, by the end. Emma had done it because she’d had no choice but to do the right thing.

She waits until the last woman has left, and Regina raises her eyes and catches Emma’s, going very still. There’s another frozen moment; but this time, Emma feels more in control of herself. She’s had plenty of time to prepare herself, even if she still has no idea what to say. “Hi,” she says, shoving her crumpled receipt at Regina.

One of the facilitators looks scandalized. Regina, her eyes fixed on Emma, shifts to blink at it. “You want me to sign  _ that _ ?” she says, cocking in eyebrow in a trademark look of disdain.

A hard knot in Emma’s stomach seems to loosen. Emma shrugs, nonchalant. “It’s all I had on me.”

Regina purses her lips, but they’re curving despite her best efforts. She flips over the receipt. “Thirty-one dollars at Buttercup Bake Shop? Really?” She blinks again, this time rapidly, and when she looks back up, her eyes are a little shinier than before. 

Emma swallows. It feels more natural than ever to have Regina tease her about her eating habits, for them to be light and happy like they haven’t been since Regina’s coronation. And it makes her hurt more, more than she’d thought would be possible today.

Regina signs the receipt in tiny, looping handwriting, and she passes it across the table to Emma for her to take it. “It was…it’s very good to meet you,” Regina says quietly, and she slips off her glove and holds her hand out to Emma. 

Emma takes off her own glove and presses her palm to Regina’s for the handshake. Something electric sparks between them, a familiar burst of energy that has Emma take a ragged breath and stare at Regina. This is torment, death by a thousand cuts, like clawing herself open from the inside out. She’d been a fool to do this to herself, and cruel to do it to Regina. 

And she still squeezes Regina’s hand and feels Regina’s grasp in return, trembling in her own.

* * *

Seeing Regina is kind of like cheating on a diet– the kind that’s gone on for so long that you’ve convinced yourself that  _ no _ , carbs aren’t actually nearly as good as you remember, and actually they’re nothing to get excited about. And then you taste some really rich, cheesy pasta and it’s all you can think about for days. Emma had spent three years reminding herself that being around Regina is all bitterness and pain, is something she’d never willingly do again, and she’s entirely unprepared for the way it discombobulates her now.

Regina has left New York, has gone with a number of African dignitaries to meet with a delegation from some kind of sinister mirror realm that had sprung up overnight off the coast of Angola. The news has been covering it nonstop since the meeting had begun, and it’s easy for Emma to sit and watch it like she’s genuinely invested in another realm and not the occasional appearances from Regina on her TV.

Right now, the media is airing the same interview from yesterday, and Emma sits on the couch and makes a halfhearted attempt to fold laundry while she watches it. “I can say with confidence that I believe that the people of this realm wish us no harm,” Regina says to the interviewer, projecting calm. “They are just as disoriented as we are, and they welcome the opportunity to coordinate with the peoples of West Africa to everyone’s benefit.” 

The screen turns back to a reporter, and Emma turns back to her laundry. “The Good Queen was escorted by Queen Tiana and Queen Snow, of their respective Enchanted Forest realms, and by companion Juliana Gutierrez. Reports indicate that she has departed from the mirror realm to her home in Storybrooke, Maine, and Queen Tiana has been assigned in her absence to chair the negotiations between the leaders of several African nations and their mirror counterparts.”

Regina is still everywhere, impossible to block out again. Once, Emma had just avoided looking at images of her. But now she finds that she can’t look away for long. Every advertisement, every newspaper with Regina plastered on its front page– they’re all she sees on her commute, and she’s taken to counting the number of Reginas she sees as though it might help her process what’s been going on lately.

_ Six  _ is a sticker on the side of a lamp _. Seven  _ is an advertisement on a scrolling board outside a bus stop. Her night shift counterpart keeps a little bobblehead Regina on the inside of the desk next to bobbleheads of the past three presidents, and she counts that one, too, once she’s settled in at the concierge desk.  _ Eight. _

And there’s  _ nine _ , she counts absentmindedly as a woman in a bespoke suit strides into the building and toward her desk. It’s a measure of how much of Regina she’s seen recently that it takes her a minute to register what she’s seeing.  _ Regina _ , without a security detail or a crowd of cameras, her eyes fixed on Emma. 

Emma says, mostly to herself, “What?” 

One of the men waiting for the elevator says, “Holy shit. Isn’t that  _ Regina _ ?” 

Regina reaches the desk, and Emma has the presence of mind to drawl, “ID badge?” 

Regina doesn’t react to that. “This is where you work?” she says, turning her head to take in the lobby. 

Emma just stares at her. “Where’s your security detail?” she asks. They’re nearly alone, but for the people who come and go and occasionally do a double-take at the sight of Regina. 

Regina wiggles her fingers and a second, vapid-eyed Regina appears beside her. “Babysitting me, as far as they know.” She wiggles them again and the second Regina disappears. “I do it when I need to get out. They’re so restrictive, and it takes them a while to catch on.” She clears her throat, her hands twisting together in front of her abdomen, and Emma watches her expectantly. “You forgot your glove.” 

“What?” 

“Your glove. At the museum.” She extends her hand and Emma’s glove appears on her palm. “You forgot it. I was going to give it back to you earlier, but I was called away on–” 

“The West Africa thing. Yeah.” Emma shakes her head a little to clear it. “Did you take a break from the peace negotiations to return my glove?” Regina’s eyes flicker away from hers. Emma must be misreading the situation. “I actually bought a new pair. See?” She pulls one out of her pocket, then sticks it back in, not sure why she felt the need to prove its existence. “I don’t even think I still have– oh, right.” She finds the missing glove’s twin in one of the desk drawers and offers it to Regina. “You should take them,” she says suddenly, noticing that Regina isn’t wearing gloves. “I get that it’s summer where you were, but it’s  _ freezing _ out here. You can’t just set your hands on fire whenever they’re chilly–” 

She’s babbling, she knows that she is, and she’s humiliating herself in front of the last person she ever wants to see her vulnerable. But Regina is smiling, her eyes gleaming with quiet affection, and Emma is silenced by it. 

Regina takes the gloves and slips them on, and Emma decides to consider it a win. “Good,” she says lamely.

Regina averts her eyes, taking in the room instead. “This is where you work?” she says again, and Emma follows her gaze around the lobby. It’s a sleek, shiny grey room, with big windows and three elevators behind plastic barriers that Emma can push a button and open to let people in. It’s nothing unique for New York, but it’s not exactly some shifty, grimy place that deserves the judgment in Regina’s voice. 

“Yeah,” Emma says, a little too belligerently. “So?”

Regina looks around again, then frowns. “This won’t do,” she says flatly.

It’s so  _ utterly  _ presumptuous for Regina to walk in three years late and tell her that she’s somehow failed at life again. “Excuse me?”

“You don’t even have coworkers. You’re just alone in this empty grey room every day.” Regina twists her fingers, lifts her chin. “This can’t be it. You can’t have spent the past few years… _ here _ .” Her lip curls, her tentativeness all but gone.

“The hours are good and the pay is decent,” Emma says, and she can feel old defensiveness rising. There had been a time when she could shrug off Regina’s condescension, but it’s been a long time since then. “And people are coming and going all day. I’m not alone. I know it’s not hanging out with royalty and prime ministers and having the entire world at your beck and call, but this is what regular people do–” 

“You’re not  _ regular _ , Emma,” Regina says quietly, and Emma stops talking and looks at her. Really  _ looks _ , pushes aside that awful last year they’d been together, and sees past the disdain that’s all over Regina’s face. Regina is being a condescending ass, yes, but she isn’t putting Emma down. She’s concerned, and Emma has to will away the heat on her cheeks and the urge to fight.

“It’s what I wanted,” she mumbles. “It’s quiet and I can…I can keep to myself, which I like. And I talk to Henry almost every day. I’m not alone.” Regina is still staring at her, her brow knitting, and Emma can feel her cheeks flush again. “I chose this.” 

“You’re wasted here,” Regina says. It’s frank, rude, and if not for the worry still shining in Regina’s eyes, Emma might have lashed out again. “You could do so much more in–” 

Emma cuts her off before the offer, mindful of the frightening possibility that she’d come running the instant that Regina beckons. “I don’t  _ want  _ to do so much more,” she says abruptly. “You can call me selfish for it. Tell me all the ways I’ve let everyone down. I’m just– I’m  _ tired _ , Regina.” There had been a time when she’d felt stronger with every battle, surrounded by her family and friends and her…Regina, who’d been both and more. But by the end, even just being in Storybrooke had sapped away her energy. 

At least before, when she’d been in a relationship that had demanded everything of her and given her nothing in return, she’d still had Regina. 

She doesn’t know how much of this is written on her face, and she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, to see the pity that follows. “How did you find me here?” she asks instead. “Even Henry doesn’t know exactly where I work.” 

There’s a light flush on Regina’s cheeks. “I know how to find you,” she murmurs. “I just…I didn’t want to be intrusive. I know you don’t want to see me.” She lifts the glove. “I just wanted to drop this off, and I didn’t think you’d want me to come to your apartment.” 

_ I know you don’t want to see me _ . It’s true. It’s how Emma had felt until now, and a few terrible life choices don’t change that. They’re both better off when they aren’t around each other, and Emma has to stop faltering just because of one chance encounter. “You thought right,” she says, her voice hollow.

Regina’s face smoothes over, her eyes growing distant. “Well, I don’t want to keep you.” They’d built a tiny, rickety bridge in the past few minutes, a dangerous path to cross to each other, and it falls into the gaping ravine between them in an instant. “I suppose we’ll be seeing each other again soon.” 

“We– what?” Emma echoes, a stab of hope quickly muted before it can make it to her face.

Regina gives nothing away. “Lucy’s quinceañera,” she reminds Emma. “It’s only a couple of months away. You will be attending, won’t you?” 

“I…yeah. Of course.” It hadn’t occurred to Emma what the quinceañera would entail until now. All of Storybrooke will attend. The media will cover the affair. And Regina will absolutely be there, in the exact same position as Emma. She tries on a wry grin. “I guess this was good practice for getting along then, huh?” 

Regina presses her lips together. “We used to get along just fine without any practice,” she says shortly, and she turns around and strides from Emma’s office.

* * *

They slide too easily into intimacy. That’s the problem with Regina and her, Emma decides. They’d spent so long as– as enemies, as rivals, as best friends, as unrequited…whatever they’d been– and now they shift from one to the other and back again without a second thought. It’s only after the coronation that things had stalled, and they’d both been too on edge to fall into anything but animosity. 

_ We used to get along just fine without any practice _ . That had been another era, and Regina has no right acting as though she’s been wounded because Emma acknowledged it. She can’t just…appear in Emma’s life and let everything go back to how it once was. 

That had always been the problem, hadn’t it? Regina does what she wants to do, at the pace that she’s decided. Redemption? First she’d prefer to put everyone at risk, take them nearly to destruction, and then almost kill herself to save the day. Romance? Not with Emma when Emma had  _ begged _ her for it, nope. Regina picks her moments and everyone else can be damned.

And yeah, Emma might have been the first to approach this time, but she hadn’t expected anything else. She hadn’t pushed into Regina’s personal life–

Well, maybe a little, Emma concedes grumpily at Henry’s prodding a week later. She hadn’t meant to tell him about their encounters, but it had slipped out in a burst of emotion. And  _ crap _ , she really needs a friend who isn’t her  _ son _ . “But I didn’t ask her to– it wasn’t like I expected her to just get over what went wrong between us. You know how your mother is.”

Henry says ruefully, “I know how both of you are, yeah.” He pauses, then says, “I know I promised I wouldn’t push anymore, but are you sure that that’s still what you want?” 

“Yes,” Emma says, quickening her pace as she walks back to the office. She’s confident of that, at least. She doesn’t need to be prodded in any direction right now. “Are you not getting how volatile we are?” 

“No, I get that loud and clear.” Henry sounds somewhere between amused and frustrated over the phone. “But are you…was it nice to talk to each other again? I’m not pushing,” he adds hastily. “I just…you’re my  _ moms _ . I want you two to be happy, and I don’t think that either of you are when you don’t have each other.” 

And  _ that  _ hits home like only raw, uncomfortable truth can. Even in that final year in Storybrooke, Emma had known more peace with Regina than she had without her. When they hadn’t been miserable, they’d been transcendent. 

Emma bites her lip, takes a breath. “I–” She stops. She’s walking past a magazine stand, and the cover of one of the tabloids has caught her attention. The cover is emblazoned with  **REGINA AND JULIANA CAUGHT IN ACTION!** and there’s a photograph on the cover of Regina and Juliana together at Storybrooke’s beach. They’re pressed together, Juliana’s arm wrapped around Regina and Regina smiling up at her, and they look very, very close.

“Ma?” Henry asks, worried. “You still there?” 

Emma clears her throat, tears her eyes away from the magazine. There’s still a lump in her throat, and she talks around it. “I think we’re doing just fine, Henry. I’ve got to go. I’m– I’m back at the office.”

Henry says, “Did I say something–?” 

“No. I’m just– I have to go to work.” She hangs up, the image she’d seen still seared into her eyes. Regina doesn’t make friends easily, doesn’t have the patience to spend too long with someone she doesn’t care deeply about. Whatever is happening with Juliana, it’s inevitably going to be…

_ Not your business _ , she reminds herself, but it rings false and hollow in her mind. 

  
It  _ feels  _ like her business. Everything Regina always does. And that’s why she has to  _ stop thinking  _ and get back to the peaceful void where she’d retreated for the past three years.


	3. Chapter 3

But that void has always been an illusion, and she knows it. Now that she’s seen Regina, she’s helpless against the rush of Regina-related thoughts that spring to mind whenever she sees her.

And there are always,  _ always _ , too many memories. It’s strange, how the years of eternal battles and trauma have settled in her mind. She remembers the agony of always expecting danger, of every day bringing a new crisis that had fallen on her to solve. She remembers feeling less like a person than an idea, a hero for a world that molds itself to demand one. And yet, it’s all muted now, like it had happened to someone else. 

The parts she remembers now are the quiet moments: Henry, his eyes trusting as he squeezes her hand; David and Snow with that fire and certainty that all would turn out well in the end; and Regina standing beside her, their joined magic bringing Emma back to life each time.

There had been an incident once in the quieter weeks between Elsa’s departure from Storybrooke and Cruella and Ursula’s arrival that Emma keeps coming back to. There had been an attack– something small, a gang of demonic trolls who’d fallen into Storybrooke via portal and had started terrorizing everyone on Main Street in the early hours of the morning. Emma hadn’t known about it at first. She and Regina had gone out for drinks the night before, and it had ended with Emma passed out on the couch in Regina’s office while Regina had slept in the chair.

They’d been awakened when a telephone pole had been hurtled through the wall of Regina’s office and nearly impaled Emma. Bleary-eyed, Regina had thrown fireball after fireball at the trolls, and Emma had joined her magic to Regina’s fire to give her some fuel. They’d gotten rid of the trolls and repaired the office, and Emma hardly recalls it as an eventful day.

The part that lingers is what had happened after, when Regina had noticed a scrape on Emma’s cheek that would have been easily repaired by a wave of her fingers. Instead, she’d fussed over Emma, led her to the couch and gotten a wet washcloth. It had been unnecessary. They’d both known it. But the night before had been a precarious, intimate dance, the two of them too close and stumbling at the imaginary line that keeps them in check. Emma had craved Regina then, and she hadn’t had the willpower to push Regina away the next day.

So Regina had fussed and wiped gently at the cut and muttered things about Emma’s  _ lack of self-preservation _ as though she wouldn’t happily leap into a burning building herself to save someone. And at the end, when there had been nothing left but to graze her knuckles against Emma’s cheek until Emma shivers, she’d pressed a lingering kiss to Emma’s cheek.

Emma had been the one to turn– just slightly, enough that it could have been a mistake– and let their lips meet. Regina’s eyes had fluttered closed, but Emma had kept hers open, had watched the way that Regina shudders and the way her lips tilt upward into a smile. It had been a perfect little snapshot in time, a moment that had ended a dozen seconds later with warm eyes and then a casual trip to Granny’s. 

They’d been fighting a few weeks before that and it had been soul-crushing, but it hadn’t been until that day, until that kiss, that Emma had acknowledged to herself that she’d loved Regina. She’d stared at Regina later, over their breakfast table at Granny’s, as Regina had sleekly cut off a piece of over-syruped pancake from Emma’s plate and slid it into her mouth.

_ What?  _ Regina had said, and she’d smiled self-consciously, wiping at her lips as though she’d had something on them.

Emma had almost said it right then– and now she’s glad she hadn’t, that they hadn’t lost what they’d had for almost another year– but she’d stopped herself. It hadn’t been the time. Instead, she’d slid her pancakes across the table to Regina and gotten herself some more, which had been another kind of  _ I love you _ that had been enough at first.

_ At first _ , but never again. Emma falls back against her apartment couch– more comfortable than Regina’s office couch, maybe, but never quite as warm and safe– and wonders if Juliana now gets that gentle fussing, if Regina closes her eyes and smiles when Juliana kisses her. Does Regina love her like she claims she had Emma? Or is it a stronger, more desperate love, the kind that might have spurred Regina to–

See,  _ this  _ is why she tries to avoid being alone with her thoughts. She scowls at herself and sits up again, determinedly thinking about what to do for lunch. It’s her day off, and she has to find  _ something  _ to occupy her time. Maybe she’ll go for a run, or…

With relief, she hears her phone vibrating with a video call.  _ Lucy. Thank god.  _ She snatches up the phone and accepts the call. 

“Grandma Regina’s dying,” Lucy says without preamble, and every lightbulb in Emma’s apartment shatters instantly. Emma is plunged into blackness, her heart pounding and adrenaline racing through her body, and she starts to speak before Lucy says, “ _ Basically _ . She has a really nasty flu.” She squints at Emma. “Why did it get so dark in there?” 

Emma hurries to open the blinds in the living room, letting light flood in again. “No reason,” she says, wincing. “Why are…why are you telling me this?” 

Lucy shrugs. “Mom and Dad are out in some weird realm where I can’t get in touch with them. Date night. With Aunt Tiana, for some reason, but I don’t ask them about  _ that _ ,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “And I have to…I have plans,” she announces. For the first time, Emma notices that Lucy is wearing makeup, and her hair is done up in a loose, stylish bun. 

“Wait a second,” Emma says, eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Lucy, what are–” 

“Can we stay on target?” Lucy interrupts her. “I know that you and Grandma  _ don’t mesh _ but she isn’t doing great and she could use the company.” There’s a sly look in her eyes, and Emma knows exactly what she’s doing. Henry had done it for years.

But still, she thinks of Regina sick in bed, all alone, and she can’t shrug it off so easily. “Lucy,” she says weakly. “I’m not…”

Lucy beams at her. “Great. You’re not going to drive all the way up here, are you? There’s a portal at Pier 11 by Wall Street that we used to take. Much faster.” 

There’s a voice in the background, a low, distinctly female, “You ready, babe?”

Emma’s eyes narrow. “Lucia Cecilia Vidrio Mills–” 

Lucy gives someone out of frame a glare, then grins impishly at Emma. “Gotta go! Bye, Grandma Emma!” The screen goes blank, leaving Emma sitting in a dark apartment with her heart thrumming.

Regina is sick, apparently unwell enough that she needs someone looking after her. Regina is a  _ terrible  _ patient. There aren’t many people she would tolerate to take care of her– just Henry, now that he’s an adult, and Emma, once upon a time. Emma has to go. She’d– well, she hadn’t  _ actually  _ promised Lucy, but–

She sighs, changes from sweatpants to jeans, and heads out to the garage where the Bug has been languishing for most of the past three years.  _ This is a chore _ , she reminds herself.  _ I’m only going because I have to _ . She hasn’t been back in Storybrooke in three years, and she hadn’t planned to go back for a long, long time. Lucy’s quinceañera is supposed to be the only exception, a single visit where she would teleport straight to the event and skip seeing any vestiges of her past.

But Emma has no choice. She slips into the Bug and basks in its familiarity, the only place she’s called home and meant it, and she heads out to Pier 11. There’s traffic along the way, slowing her down, and a hefty charge for the portal that she shells out reluctantly. Lucy’s call had been over an hour ago by now.

She drives through the looping arc of the portal and emerges in a large station that she’s never seen before, reading  **_STORYBROOKE STATION – UNITED REALMS SEAT_ ** . Over the past three years, it’s been converted into a thoroughfare for various portals, and cars and horses emerge from different portals and follow the roads to other ones. Emma follows the sign that says  **_MAIN STREET EXIT_ ** , slowed down by the self-driving royal carriage in front of her.

It’s dizzying, unfamiliar, a modern convenience that she remembers the news discussing a couple of years ago, and Emma breathes a sigh of relief when she emerges on a familiar Main Street. It’s more crowded than it used to be, with a few more traffic lights and groups of pedestrians on the sidewalk, but it’s still the same hub of small business that it’s always been. 

It takes a good five minutes to find parking, and Emma squeezes into a tiny spot and heads into Granny’s. Granny has done well for herself with the new business. She has four waitresses managing full tables and a fifth handling the line to be seated. Emma ducks around the line to the counter.

“Hey!” the fifth waitress says, frowning at her. “There’s a line.” 

Emma holds up a disarming hand. “I’m getting my food to go,” she says.

“Takeout is in the drive-through in the back.” The girl jabs a finger toward the back of the diner. “And there’s a line for  _ that _ , too, so how about you get back in your car and–” 

She’s interrupted by Granny, emerging from the kitchen. “As I live and breathe,” she says, squinting through her glasses. “Emma Swan, is that you?” 

The waitress says, eyes flickering between them, “I was just telling her to wait on line–”

“As well you should,” Granny says approvingly. “You’re doing exactly what you should. I’m making an exception for her, though. Emma,” she says, seizing Emma’s hand between hers. “Are you back? You look like you’ve been through it.” 

Emma isn’t sure whether or not to be offended. “I do?” 

“You’ve lost weight.” Granny tuts. “No Re–” She stumbles over the word, her eyes on Emma with trepidation, then amends, “No one where you’ve been to keep you well-fed, hm? Stay right here. I’ll whip up some of my–” 

Emma intervenes before she’s slowed down even more. “I just came by for some soup,” she says. “I, uh…I wanted to bring it to someone I know who’s not feeling well.”

Recognition registers in Granny’s eyes. Regina, Emma realizes, would probably have walked around town halfway at death’s door before she’d have surrendered to the flu and laid down. “Oh,” Granny breathes, and then she beams up at Emma. “It’s on the house.” 

“Granny–” 

“Here.” Granny busies herself with three large vats in the corner. “I’ll give you a bit of each kind so you and your friend can pick what you’d like. She might be partial to the mushroom, I don’t know,” she says airily. “And I’ll throw in some donuts. And a bear claw. And maybe a little apple pie–” 

By the time Granny’s finished with her, the poor fifth waitress has been assigned to help her carry the bags of food to the car and they’re both groaning under the weight of them. “Sorry,” Emma says sheepishly. “Granny went a little overboard there.” 

“It’s fine.” The girl smiles suddenly. “It’s me. Wendy Darling, remember? You got me out of Neverland. We moved here last year from our realm. Much less disease.” She laughs. “And Granny usually likes it when I talk down to uppity customers. I didn’t recognize you at first.” She sets her bag down in the passenger seat, then looks surreptitiously back at it. “Are you going to see Regina? Just…only because I’ve heard things.” She blushes at Emma’s stare. “About what close friends you were. It’s a carefully guarded Storybrooke secret. Everyone knows you wanted your privacy.”

“Yeah.” Emma forces a smile. “I’m just dropping by. It was good to see you.”

“Yeah,” Wendy echoes. “I hope you’ll come back soon. Everyone here really misses you.” She looks up at Emma through her eyelashes, her words tentative, and she retreats back to Granny’s before Emma can come up with a response.

* * *

She parks in the driveway, her Bug right beside Regina’s old Mercedes, and she clamps down on the uneasy thought that it’s exactly where it belongs. She’s just stopping by to help out. This isn’t where she wants to be. Storybrooke has been haunting her for far too long for her to return willingly. 

Regina’s door is locked, but Emma finds the right key in the tangle of keychains in her car and slides it open. Inside, the house is quiet. 

It’s like muscle memory, coming back to the mayoral mansion. While Town Hall has been converted into a meeting hall for world leaders and large delegations, Regina had always been adamant that her house remain just hers, free of security teams and diplomatic decorations and anything but the familiar decor of the home where she’d raised Henry. 

Emma finds the pots where they’d been on the day that she’d left town, heats up the soup as though she’s been cooking in the kitchen every day since, and leaves it simmering on the stove before she ventures upstairs. Regina’s door is open a crack, and Emma can see her moving in her bed.

Her face is flushed and sweaty, and she’s tossing and turning in her sleep, letting out little groans each time she moves. Emma slips into the room, wets a washcloth in the bathroom, and then sits down on the bed to lay it on Regina’s forehead. 

Regina burrows into her, the tossing and turning subsiding, and Emma swallows and stays put. She glances around the room, taking in the slight changes over time. There is a tiara hanging loosely on a hook above the dresser, a few recent books on the bedside table about various realms and one of Henry’s below them. One of Lucy’s paintings– a large one of the bar that Regina had kept in Hyperion Heights, Emma thinks– is hanging over her bed, and there are a few new photographs on the dresser. Two of them are Regina with Henry and Lucy and Jacinda, and a third–

A third is of Emma with Henry from years ago at his graduation, Henry beaming widely with an arm wrapped around Emma’s shoulders. It’s– Regina must have put it back up recently, Emma’s certain, but  _ no _ , there’s a layer of dust at the edges of the frame that seems to imply the opposite. Regina’s kept this picture for a long time, even after all the hostility between them.

The thing is, Emma’s  _ positive _ that it hadn’t been on Regina’s dresser the last time that Emma had been in Storybrooke, because it had been in her house, hanging on the wall, in that exact frame. She’d sold the house a year after she’d left, determined to cut all ties, and Snow had offered to empty out the house for her and pack up her things. There hadn’t been much to pack, and what she’d needed she’d brought along.

Snow must have given the picture to Regina, but why? Why would Regina take it, with how much they’d hated each other by the end? 

Too many questions. Emma turns away to busy herself with the washcloth on Regina’s forehead, flipping it over to the clean side and brushing Regina’s hair from where it’s sticking to her face. Regina’s eyes open slowly, groggily. “Oh,” she mumbles. “Not you.” 

“Good to see you, too,” Emma says lightly, doing her best to brush off that unenthusiastic welcome. “I put up some soup downstairs. I’m going to bring some up in a teacup so you don’t have to get out of bed.” She stands up, straightening the blanket where she’s mussed it. “Lucy has gone out on what I’m pretty sure is a  _ date _ , which makes me want to dye every grey hair that I definitely don’t have, but please don’t eviscerate her maybe-girlfriend or she’ll never forgive us. She called me in to keep an eye on you, because I guess you’re still a big baby when you’re sick.” 

Regina pulls herself up slowly and stares at Emma like she’s seeing a ghost. “Emma?” she whispers. 

And  _ there  _ it is. It seems very silly, suddenly, to pretend that this is fine and normal. “Yeah,” Emma says, shifting onto her heels. “It’s me. You’re not hallucinating.” She points to the picture of Henry at graduation. “This was mine.” 

Regina coughs, a pitiful little sound. “Finders keepers,” she informs Emma, slumping back in the bed. “I took back that blanket I got you for your thirty-third, too. I wasn’t going to stick it into the attic to get ruined.” She scowls up at said attic, and the truth dawns on Emma.

“My mother said that she was going to clean out the house.” 

“Your mother decided to go on a three-week vacation to Camelot right before she offered. I took care of it.” Regina’s voice is hoarse from a clogged throat, giving her a kind of low, throaty husk that sends a little shiver down Emma’s spine.

“You took my blanket?” Emma says. It had been a soft, ridiculously expensive blanket that they’d shared with Henry for dozens of movie nights. Regina had done some kind of charm on it that had made the blanket burst into flame whenever Emma’s then-husband had gone near it, and repair itself whenever he’d walked away. 

He’d hated it. Regina had been a smug bastard about it. Emma had been so charmed by Regina’s delight that she’d kept the blanket and not the husband, eventually. “I want it back.” 

“Go to hell.” Regina sinks back into her bed, and Emma catches sight of said blanket tucked under her comforter. “You left it and it’s mine now.” 

Emma jabs a finger at her. “I am bringing that back to my apartment with me,” she says. 

Regina just sniffs in disdain. It becomes a full-fledged sniffle, then a sneeze. “Picking on me when I’m at my weakest,” she says sourly. “That’s low, even for you.” 

“Even for me?” Emma echoes. “What the hell does that–?” She catches herself before they fall into a meaningless fight. “Okay,” she says. “I’m going to get the soup.”

When she returns, the blanket is neatly folded at the foot of the bed, and Regina is avoiding her eyes. “It’s fine,” Emma says, a lump in her throat. “I don’t really need it. You can…” 

“No, you take it.” Regina takes the teacup gingerly. The awkwardness has returned, brought forth by the almost-sniping, and Emma wants to blame Regina for starting it but bites that back, too. “It was your gift,” Regina says, sipping at the soup. “You deserve to keep it.”

“Just eat your soup, Regina,” Emma says, exasperated, and she takes the blanket and lays it over Regina again. Regina’s wearing one of Henry’s old t-shirts and a pair of sweatpants that Emma is nearly positive are hers, and Emma thinks wryly that the media wouldn’t even recognize their favorite queen like this.

They sit in silence for a little while, Regina drinking her soup and Emma eating a slice of cheesecake that Granny had sent. Regina wrinkles her nose at the crumbs on her floor, and Emma says, challenging, “So let’s go downstairs, then.” 

“I’m not going down there. I look like death.”

Emma takes her in critically. Regina’s hair is developing a little halo of frizz as it begins to curl up, and her face is splotched with red at the eyes and nose, but she doesn’t look nearly as terrible as she insists. It’s a little cute, even, though Emma might not be the best judge of what might make Regina look  _ bad _ . “You should take a shower. You’ll feel a little more human after that.” 

“Ugh,” Regina says, leaning back against her pillow. “I’m not getting out of–” 

Emma twists her wrist and discovers, to her satisfaction, that she’s still got it. Regina vanishes from her bed and reappears, standing, in front of Emma with a glower on her face. “Don’t  _ ever _ do that again,” Regina says, her voice dangerous. 

“Remember that time you transported me onto a footbridge and then started yanking it apart?” Emma says pleasantly, and Regina whirls around with a scowl on her face and strides toward the shower. She doesn’t stomp, exactly, but it’s implied. 

“And don’t you dare put your boots on my comforter!” Regina snaps from behind the closed door. Emma grins, sliding her boots off before she stretches out on Regina’s bed. 

_ This  _ feels like old times, like those years when Henry had been making his way through high school and Emma had been reluctantly married. In some ways, those had been the easiest years. There had been fewer grand threats, and Emma had spent most of her free time with Regina and Henry, savoring every moment like it had been the first. There hadn’t been as much kissing, but there had still been  _ love _ , the quiet love of family like what Emma had longed for for her entire life.

Everything might have changed, but this still feels right. She lets her eyes drift closed, and when the shower turns on, does her best to focus on the wafting smell of the soup warming on the stove instead of thoughts of Regina in the–

_ Thump _ . There’s a bang and the sound of something crashing in the bathroom, and Emma is jerked out of her peaceful almost-stupor. “Regina?” she calls, and worry curdles her stomach. Regina isn’t well, and if she’d fallen in the shower… 

Emma surges forward, suddenly panicked, and throws the door to the bathroom open. “Regina?” she says, her voice strident. “Regina, are you–”

She stops short. Regina’s figure is visible through the frosted shower walls, perfectly upright as Regina pushes the door to the shower open. “What’s wrong–?” Regina starts, eyes wide, and Emma freezes.

Regina is naked. Gloriously, stunningly naked, rivulets of water sliding down the curves of her skin and meeting again at her legs, at… “Something…I heard something…” Emma breathes, her throat closing up. She tries to look away, to drag her eyes back up to Regina’s, but that’s even worse. 

Regina’s eyes are burning with renewed heat, and Emma can’t breathe. She takes a step forward, then another, moving as though she’d been summoned, and Regina still doesn’t retreat back into the shower. “I got…I was worried,” Emma manages to choke out. 

She’s close enough that Regina splays a hand against her abdomen, but doesn’t push her away. Emma trembles with need, with renewed desire, with a surging fire that courses through her body for the first time in years. Regina had always been able to do this to her, to wipe Emma’s mind clean of anything but her touch, and Emma is suddenly very aware of how many years it’s been and how alone she’s been since the night of the coronation. Emma shivers, but she doesn’t move as Regina’s hands begin their crawl up her body, sliding up her stomach and onto her chest as though Regina is in a trance–

And then, Regina sneezes three times in rapid succession and jumps back, chagrined. Emma shakes her head, struggling for some clarity, and she realizes exactly where she is and what she’d been nearly about to do. “I– heard something,” she says, spinning around to stare into the doorway. She’s breathing hard, and she has to clench her fists to focus on  _ something _ , anything but the naked woman behind her. “I thought you fell.” 

“I dropped the bottle of conditioner,” Regina murmurs, subdued. “I think it would be best if–” 

“Yeah.” Emma bobs her head. “Yeah.” She makes a hasty escape from the bathroom, still simmering with tension she won’t be able to release for the rest of the evening.

* * *

  
By the time Regina emerges from the shower, Emma’s gotten herself under control and has settled down on the couch downstairs. Her old blanket is spread across the couch, awaiting Regina, and it’s exactly as comfortable as she remembers it. It has a scent to it now, that familiar one that she’d always associated with Regina and home, and she’s wrapped blissfully in it as she awaits Regina. 

Regina slips under the blanket on the couch, eyeing the bags from Granny’s with suspicion. “I didn’t realize you meant you’d just be moving the crumbs from my bedroom to my living room.” 

“You’re such a tightass,” Emma retorts, opening a plastic container containing a different cheesecake. “As if you won’t just magic the crumbs away.” 

Regina sniffs. “I don’t waste my magic on trivial things like that,” she says, waving her hand so the TV remote appears in her hand. Emma looks pointedly at it, and Regina raises her chin. “When I’m not sick, obviously.” 

She puts on a movie that Emma vaguely recognizes and doesn’t care about, a background noise that neither of them bother to watch. Regina sticks a spoon into the cheesecake, taking a bite and licking it clean, and then she seizes the container. “Mine.”

By silent agreement, there is no discussion of what had happened upstairs. Emma winces when she thinks about it, an embarrassing warmth rising through her. They really can’t be trusted alone, can they? 

Regina gives her an odd look. “What are you thinking about?” 

“The cheesecake you just stole from me,” Emma says, trying to grab it back. She gets a little electrical shock to her palm for her efforts. “Hey!” 

“Tell me you’ve been eating  _ something  _ other than this poison for the past three years,” Regina says, eyeing Emma with mock-concern. 

Emma scowls at her. “You know, I managed to feed myself just fine for twenty-eight years before I met you. And are you really the one to call other people’s pastries poison?” 

Regina smirks. She’s looking much more like herself now, with a healthier glow to her freshly washed face. It suits her, the lack of makeup and ornamentation that comes with her media appearances, and the smirk suits her even more. “I don’t know how you look the way you do when you eat like  _ that _ ,” she says, shaking her head.

“I work out twice a day,” Emma says, patting her abdomen. “I need lots of calories.” 

“I remember,” Regina says dryly. “I used to cook for you.” But there’s a spark of fondness in her voice, undeniable affection, and their jabs today are gentle instead of scarring. “Even after we…after the coronation, I’d send Henry to your house with leftovers. I was sure you’d be eating nothing but burgers if I didn’t.”

Emma blinks at Regina.  _ That _ she hadn’t known. She’d eaten the leftovers, of course, and known they were Regina’s, but she’d figured Henry had been smuggling them to her. “We hated each other.”

Regina’s brow creases. “I didn’t hate you,” she says, and she sets the cheesecake down and leans against the back of the couch to watch Emma. “Did you hate me?” 

Emma closes her eyes, her only escape from Regina’s penetrating stare. “I didn’t…I didn’t like you very much,” she murmurs. She’s speaking in past tense, which strikes her as a very dangerous thing to do right now. When she opens her eyes, Regina is still watching her. “Or maybe I was just very angry. I don’t know.” 

“I was furious with you.” Regina says it plainly, without any accusation. In this familiar room, curled under the same blanket and surrounded by Granny’s best comfort food, it feels like a safe place to touch on wounds they haven’t dared prod before. “Everything you said and did, that last year…it felt like an attack. Even when you might not have meant it to be one.” 

“Oh, I did.” Emma chews on her lip. “You weren’t wrong. I wanted to hurt you.” It feels like another betrayal to say that, to take some of the blame for how wrong everything had gone. “I didn’t…I didn’t like myself very much for it, either.” 

Regina reaches out to lay a hand on Emma’s. “When I think back…I think I spent a lot of our friendship snapping at you,” she admits. “And you were very good at defusing that, so I would keep pushing and leave it to you to let it go. I didn’t know how to be that person when you stopped being her.” Her eyes are dark and mournful, and within them Emma sees the years that they’ve lost.

Emma yearns for her. Not like she had upstairs, exactly, mouth dry and her body craving Regina’s. No, this is another kind of intimacy, the kind that leaves her breathless with aching. Her body and heart and soul alike all cry out for an embrace, for a touch, for the closeness they’d lost and might never regain. She  _ needs _ Regina like she needs oxygen, needs to have her in her arms now, and she might never recover if she doesn’t reach for her now.

So she does, letting her hand fall against Regina’s cheek, and Regina exhales as though she’s been just as gripped by the desperation Emma feels. Regina’s hand comes to Emma’s skin, brushes the hair out of Emma’s face, and Emma whispers, “I never hated you.” 

Regina leans forward, and Emma knows this movement, knows exactly what happens next. It’s who they are, what they do, and Emma keeps her eyes open as Regina’s lips brush against hers. Her hands rise to hold Regina’s face, to keep her where she belongs, and Emma’s heart is thumping so loudly and quickly that she isn’t entirely sure that she isn’t having a panic attack.

But there is no panic. There is only the two of them, kissing through four years apart, and Emma feels a slow calm spread through her body. She’d be content to stay here forever, to wipe away the past and let this be their new future, even if it’s all it will ever be. Regina’s lips are her anchor to the world, and she’s been bobbing away at sea without them. 

The doorbell rings and they pull apart. Regina’s eyes are sparkling, and Emma is smiling wider than she has in a long time. “You’re going to get  _ such  _ a nasty flu,” Regina murmurs. “I’ll have to bring you every soup in Queens to make it better.” 

“You’d better,” Emma says, licking her lips, and Regina’s eyes shift shamelessly to them. “I’ll go get the door. It had better be Lucy  _ alone _ .” She pulls herself off the couch as the bell rings again, and she saunters to the front door, her lips still tingling. “Lucy–” she starts, opening the door.

Juliana Gutierrez blinks at her. She’s standing on the porch in a casual tee and jeans, sunglasses propped up at the top of her head, and there’s a large teddy bear tucked under her arm. “Hello,” she says, her voice questioning. “Regina isn’t actually letting her security detail into the house now, is she?”

Emma stares. “What?” 

“Sorry,” Juliana says, peering at her with renewed puzzlement. “I…who are you?” 

And Emma is  _ not  _ going to be the kind of petty woman who hates another woman for getting cozy with her…Regina. Regina has very, very bland taste in men, but she’s far more discerning when it comes to the women in her life, and if she likes Juliana enough to be in some kind of maybe-relationship with her, then Juliana is probably okay. Emma is  _ not  _ going to hate her or say something cutting. She’s going to be cool. She can be cool. 

“I’m Emma,” she says, and waits for…some kind of flicker of recognition. Some burst of understanding and maybe even a realization of exactly the awkward situation that she and Juliana are currently in. 

She gets none of that. “Emma,” Juliana repeats. “Wait, I know. You were assigned to Regina in Neverland. I didn’t realize you’d been brought in long-term.” 

“I’m not security.” This is impossible. There’s no way that Regina has someone in her life who doesn’t know about Emma– who doesn’t know Emma  _ exists _ . “I’m…I used to live here,” she says, gesturing vaguely at the rest of Storybrooke outside, behind Juliana. She takes a step back, remembering at last to let Juliana in. 

Juliana snaps her fingers. “Right! You’re Granny’s granddaughter.” She grins, revealing a very lovely camera-ready smile. “Last time I saw you, you were a brunette. How’s the girlfriend?”

Emma doesn’t answer. It’s inconceivable that Regina wouldn’t have mentioned her. That  _ Henry  _ or  _ Lucy  _ wouldn’t. That Juliana could have been cozying up to Regina for months, have struck up a real relationship with her, and wouldn’t know that Emma exists. 

Regina calls from the couch, “Emma? Please don’t kill Lucy’s date without me there.” 

Juliana winks at Emma, a conspiratorial look that Emma doesn’t share. “Let me surprise her,” she says in a low voice, and holds up the bear. “She’s going to pretend to  _ hate  _ this.” The bear is, Emma realizes suddenly, a Regina Bear. It wears a crown and has, written across its stomach in looping letters,  _ HOPE YOU’RE FEELING BEARY MAGICAL AGAIN SOON! _ “Two puns. Tasteless,” Juliana says, grinning.

And Emma, who doesn’t know how to speak to this person in Regina’s life who doesn’t know her, forces a smile and says, “Yeah, she will. Here, let me–” She waves her hand and a little stuffed fireball appears in the bear’s palm. Juliana looks at her in astonishment. “There,” Emma says. “She’s going to secretly love it.” She reaches into her pocket to find her keys and notes with relief that they’re in there, along with her phone. “I’m going to head out,” she says, eyeing Juliana. “You’ll stay with her?” 

She doesn’t wait for a response, making her way past Juliana and toward the garage. 

Juliana says, “Ruby.”

Emma pauses, confused. “What?”

“I’m not great with faces, but I’m pretty good at names,” Juliana says from the doorway. She watches Emma with her brow crinkled, studying her with a penetrating stare that might have given Regina’s a run for its money. “It came back to me. Granny’s granddaughter is Ruby, not Emma. So who are you?” 

“I’m Emma,” Emma says helplessly. Once, that had been enough for anyone in Regina’s life to know her. “Tell Regina I said bye, okay? I’ll see her around.” She walks rapidly down the walk, cutting across the lawn to the driveway, and she slips into her car before Juliana can ask her any more questions.

And despite a day that had been a little bit of everything she’s dreamed of for years, Emma feels a surge of hopeless defeat.


	4. Chapter 4

Leaving so abruptly hadn’t alienated Regina, at least. Emma returns home to a bouquet of flowers on her kitchen table, no message necessary, and she snaps a picture of them and texts it to Regina.  _ These had better be from you and not a very considerate burglar, _ she writes just below a series of terse messages from three years before. 

Regina doesn’t respond, but the bouquet glows with magic and then doubles in size. Emma, who has already prepared for it, has her hands on the vase to steady it. Regina is  _ so  _ predictable.

She thinks that that’s the end of it, which is probably for the best. It still burns that Juliana hadn’t known her, but as the days pass, she wonders if she wouldn’t have done the same. She doesn’t talk about Regina unless forced into it, and Regina might be just as reluctant to discuss Emma. 

Especially to her girlfriend, if… 

_ No if _ . Non-girlfriends don’t show up at your house with a teddy bear because you have the flu. Emma and Regina aren’t anything close to that, and never have been. Their kiss had been the kind of kiss they’d shared for years, meaningless and nothing but simple affection.

And now they’re right back to where they were, except that Emma does in fact get a mild flu the next Thursday. It’s more likely that it’s because of the shared cheesecake than the kiss, which is what she tells Henry on the phone. “I’m fine,” she says. She doesn’t get that nice husky voice that Regina does when she has a stuffed nose. Instead, she just sounds nasal. “I had a day off today, and I’ll be fine tomorrow.” 

Regina has already recovered, and is off in Oz this week facilitating the opening of the first Krispy Kreme in the Emerald City. Not a sentence that Emma had ever thought she’d hear from Henry’s mouth.

But in the morning, when Emma sits down on the subway, the woman sitting beside her– wearing sunglasses in December, as though that isn’t conspicuous enough– says, “Emma,” sounding very miffed. “You can’t go to work today. You have the flu.” 

One person across the aisle shifts back away from them. No one else bothers to move. 

Emma leans back against the wall of the train. “Aren’t you supposed to be bringing capitalism to Oz?” 

“Apple started marketing there years ago. I’m not  _ bringing capitalism _ , I’m building bridges–” Regina shakes her head, pursing her lips together. “And that’s beside the point. Henry told me you have the flu.” 

“Barely.” Emma waves it off. “My alternate is away this weekend and it would have been more work to have the agency call in a stand-in.” 

“It would not.” Regina tilts her sunglasses so Emma can see her sharp eyes. “You are going home, and I am going to force-feed you soup and return the favor. You’re not getting out of this.” 

As tempting as it sounds to be alone with Regina again, this time with no interruption, Emma is pretty sure that it would be a mistake.  _ Especially _ after last time. “Go back to Oz, Regina,” she says, patting Regina’s thigh. “I’ve got this handled. It’s not exactly taxing to sit at a desk all day hitting the button to let people in.” 

Regina stays with her for the entire train ride, looking suspiciously at her every time she coughs, and Emma keeps her hand on Regina’s thigh and tries not to think about it. They only split up two stops before Emma’s, where there’s a connection to a portal back to Oz. “Go,” Emma says, nudging Regina. “Turn all of Oz into a commercialistic brand name heaven. They’re counting on you.”

She isn’t surprised when she gets home that evening and finds her fridge stocked with homemade food and her old blanket left neatly folded on the side of the couch.

Storybrooke being the seat of the United Realms means that it’s just as hard to teleport into it as it is any alternate realm, so Emma has to go down to Pier 11 and walk through the portal to transport herself into the mayor’s office at Town Hall. It’s one of the few things about Town Hall that haven’t changed. She leaves the blanket on Regina’s chair and then hesitates. It doesn’t feel like enough. Emma doesn’t get the same pleasure from excessive spoilage as Regina does, but she wants to do  _ something _ , and so she doodles a few little pictures of Regina as the Evil Queen onto Post-It notes– complete with bursting cleavage– and decorates Regina’s desk with them.

Regina texts her a link to something that she opens and barks out a laugh. It’s a video entitled  _ The Evil Queen’s Apples _ and is unmistakably a porn parody of Regina’s backstory. She watches almost five minutes of it before the actress playing Snow White starts getting a little too close to the actor playing Regina and she can’t handle what comes next.

She texts Regina after.  _ Offended I didn’t make an appearance. _

_ Please _ , Regina retorts,  _ You’re Storybrooke’s best-kept secret. _

Emma thinks back to Juliana, who hadn’t known her name, and she wonders if that’s all it is– if Storybrooke is just keeping Emma from the world. It niggles at her, feels uncomfortable and alienating in ways that she can’t describe, and she doesn’t respond to Regina’s text.

Regina sends another message.  _ It isn’t that anyone is ashamed of you. Storybrooke adores you. And a lot of townspeople feel that after all you’ve done for Storybrooke, the least that they can do is give you the privacy that you’ve wanted. _

She hadn’t wanted privacy, specifically. She’d wanted to stop hurting and being hurt, and the best way had been to keep a low profile. But it leaves a lump in her throat at the idea of it, Storybrooke united around her like she’s a favorite daughter. 

There’s another pause, then,  _ I’m scheduled to drive through NYC on my way to a conference in DC this Sunday. I don’t know what your schedule is like, but if you’re around…  _ The ellipsis is inviting and uncertain at once, and Emma responds before Regina can get too antsy.

_ Yeah, I think I have a spare sick day. _ She grins to herself, smug at the reminder of the one time she’d gotten her way when Regina had insisted otherwise.

Regina only answers with a  _ don’t remind me _ and an eye roll emoji. 

It’s only after the exchange that it occurs to Emma that Regina under no circumstances needs to take a lengthy drive down to DC. For one, all she needs to do is walk through any portal to the Land Without Magic and teleport. For another, even if she needs to drive and bring her team along, Emma had  _ seen _ the sign for  **_WASHINGTON, DC – NATIONAL MALL_ ** in Storybrooke Station. New York is a detour, not a step along the way.

Regina is stopping by to see her. 

The warmth of that knowledge carries Emma through the week. Sunday morning, she cooks a pasta and chicken stir fry and packages it into a container. They’re meeting at Central Park, which might make this less than practical, but Emma is ready to prove that she’s perfectly capable of cooking for herself.

She almost doesn’t recognize Regina, sitting in front of Belvedere Castle as though she’s perfectly aware of the irony. She’s got those conspicuous sunglasses perched on her nose again, but her hair is pulled back into a ponytail and she’s bundled in a long coat and leggings that give no impression of belonging to any sort of Good Queen. When Emma glances around, she sees a few familiar men and women, absorbed in the view or their phones.

“We’re going for subtlety today,” Regina murmurs when Emma approaches. “A little bit more privacy, no questions asked. I told them I wanted a quiet day with a friend.” 

“Before your long trek to DC, right?”

Regina narrows her eyes at Emma. “Don’t ruin this.” But she’s smiling under her scowl, and they walk contentedly down the path together, their hands brushing with every step. 

Regina’s security must be following them, but Emma doesn’t see it, and it feels like being alone with Regina. People walk by and don’t give them a second glance, and a kid slams full-on into Regina at one point without so much as an apology. “Remember being normal?” Emma says.

Regina laughs. “No,” she says. “The last time I tried to be  _ normal _ in this city, Henry got up in front of a crowd of pedestrians and made a fool out of himself until he saved the day.” 

“I remember that.” It had been after Regina had lost her so-called soulmate and they’d sniped at each other for half the trip. Emma hardly remembers that part as much as she does what had followed, Regina’s hand on her shoulder and her eyes wet. “Do you still feel the way you did then?” 

She doesn’t need to clarify, to remind Regina of confessions of the Evil Queen still lurking beneath the surface. Regina shrugs unhappily. “Not all of the time,” she says. “But sometimes, I’ll be negotiating between two terrible options and I’ll look at all those self-important, self-absorbed clowns in the room and just want to…” Her hand curves into a claw, the quick motion of her wrist like tearing out a heart. “Sometimes I’ll see how easy it would be to destroy instead of build.” Her voice is low, a little hoarse, and Emma can hear the pain in it.

Emma reaches out to squeeze Regina’s hand. “You still get to chew out the idiots, though, right?” 

Regina laughs. “ _ So _ often. It almost makes it worth it.” She stares out at the open grass ahead of them, pensive. “I don’t think I’ll ever move past what I’ve done. But I’ve come to terms with it.” Her hand still swings in Emma’s, and Emma tries not to think too hard about it. “There’s going to be an Oscar-bait movie about my journey soon. It’s going to be gritty and dark and…” She sighs like an eye roll, but Emma can feel the discomfort emanating from her. “I have been advised to block the release, but I think it might be a good thing for people to understand where I’ve been.” 

“That’s the one with Juliana, right? Is it already filmed?” Emma keeps her voice light, casual. “I thought she was shadowing you for it.” 

“Not in months,” Regina says, tossing her an amused smile that gives away nothing. Her hand is still in Emma’s, and Emma holds it and refuses to ask Regina anything else about Juliana. 

Nothing needs to ruin their afternoon. 

Afternoon turns to evening, and Regina is approached by a woman that Emma knows is from her team. “We need to head out soon. You’re expected at the Oval Office for your meeting with the president tonight.” 

“She can wait,” Regina says irritably, but she shifts from the bench where she’s been tucked in beside Emma. “I’m going to run to the restroom for a minute. Come, Emma.” 

The restrooms in Central Park are as clean as can be expected, and Emma can’t imagine Regina willingly using one, but she follows Regina to the restroom and notes that Regina’s security team doesn’t join them. They check the bathroom before Regina enters and then stand outside, blocking any strangers from entering. “I’m always exactly aware of where they are,” Regina mutters, carefully reapplying her makeup and smoothing out her hair. Her sunglasses are off, and Emma can at last see her eyes. “It’s suffocating.”

“I’m still happy you have them,” Emma murmurs, and she means it, is glad she’d pushed so hard and been listened to. “You can only fireball the people you see coming.”

Regina sighs, but she doesn’t argue. “It was good to see you today,” she says, and Emma is the one to lean forward and brush a gentle kiss to Regina’s lips. 

“Yeah,” she breathes against them, and Regina smiles into the kiss, her fingers tangling into Emma’s for a moment. 

It’s a peaceful, quiet moment to treasure, and that’s why it’s even more jarring when they emerge from the bathroom to a crowd and a dozen cameras. “Your Majesty! Your Majesty, who’s with you?” someone is calling. Emma ducks her head and Regina steps in front of her immediately, her eyes flashing.

“Go,” she mutters. “I can handle them.” Emma closes her eyes and imagines her apartment, exhaling when she reappears there with her backpack still slung over her shoulder. 

She doesn’t check the news. Instead, she goes for a run and shuts out the world, and she only knows that she’s been made when she sees her mother’s name appear on her phone screen. “Hi, Mom.” 

Snow’s voice is higher than it should ever be. “You never  _ told  _ me!”

Emma slows down, panting, and sinks onto a bench. “There’s nothing to–” 

“How long have you two been seeing each other? I could have  _ sworn _ that Regina was dating Jul– is that how you got together?” 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop.” Emma holds up a hand that Snow can’t see. “We’re not  _ together _ . We’re just…we’re working on being friends again. That’s all.” 

“Working on–” Snow laughs. “Emma,” she says, her tone that patronizing one that Emma’s always hated. “You and Regina were never friends. I thought you’d figured that out by now.” She changes tacks so quickly that Emma can’t respond to that. “The whole world is trying to figure out who you are now. It’s only a matter of time. Why don’t you come stay here for a little while?” 

“I’ll pass.” Snow has been trying to convince Emma to come stay in the Enchanted Forest with her for years. It’s a world that Emma has no interest in living in, and she’s said so time and again. “I have work tomorrow. I don’t think anyone’s going to find me in the middle of the most populated city in the country.”

Snow pushes a little more, then lets it go, and Emma hangs up and heads home. Regina has left her a cactus on the kitchen table this time, and Emma texts her.  _ A cactus? _

_ I thought you’d kill anything else, _ Regina retorts, and Emma laughs and sets the cactus on her dresser where she can see it and no visitors will. Snow’s words are still at the back of her mind, a gentle warning, and Emma pushes them aside. None of that is what’s going on.  _ Nothing  _ is going on.

The media finds out her name within the week.

* * *

They don’t find  _ her _ , though, because she’s been careful to reinvent herself under a different last name. Emma Blanchard, who would never ping the media’s sensors, and the pictures that the media has are so old that even the white collar workers who enter her lobby every day don’t recognize her. 

“The interesting thing about this Emma Swan,” a blonde talk show host announces, “Is that she totally disappeared twelve years ago.” An old photograph that Emma had used on Tinder to snag bail jumpers is onscreen, Emma made up and wearing a sultry smile that makes her look like someone else. “Just vanished and left behind a forwarding address to Storybrooke, Maine. Isn’t that  _ interesting _ ?” 

“So she’s a Storybrooke resident,” her co-host says, frowning under bushy eyebrows. “What’s the story there?” 

“The story is this.” The camera shifts to pre-recorded footage from Storybrooke, first to Archie Hopper, who looks bemused.

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he says, and Emma leans back against her couch and feels, instead of excluded, protected.

“Never heard of her,” Granny says in the next clip, rolling dough and ignoring the cameras on her.

Blonde Host says, “Not one Storybrooke resident seemed to know who Emma Swan was.” 

The camera moves to– is that  _ Albert Spencer _ ? Emma tenses, but he just grunts, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stop wasting my time,” and returns to his desk. 

Bushy Eyebrows frowns again. “So who is this mysterious Emma Swan?” 

Blonde jabs a finger at the screen behind her. “Oddly, we found one reference to her in New York City, about a year and a half after she disappeared from Boston, listed as mother of one Henry Swan in the public school system.” Henry at twelve appears on the screen, grinning in his school ID. “Isn’t that Henry Mills?” 

“So this Emma Swan is an alias that Regina Mills has used,” Bushy Eyes guesses. “Then who is the real Emma Swan?” 

Blonde waves a hand. “The real question is, is she getting in the way of the budding romance between Her Majesty and actress Juliana Gutierrez?” 

Emma switches off the TV and texts Regina instead of dwelling on that question.  _ Thinking about shopping for a dress for Lucy’s quinceañera this Saturday.  _ It could be the precursor to a conversation instead of an invitation, no pressure on Regina–

The response comes almost instantaneously.  _ Portland, 11:00. Don’t pick anything without me. I refuse to look like the OLD grandmother _ .

Emma doesn’t comment on the fact that, considering the current media buzz around her identity, Emma will probably not be appearing at the quinceañera as a grandmother at all. She also chooses not to comment on the fact that Regina is supposed to be in Wonderland this Saturday, as per the news.

Regina comes to Portland with only two security guards and a little charm that makes her face look slightly different, enough that she only resembles herself. Emma doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t object.

They pick out dresses and try them on, even though Regina will have to wear something more appropriately gaudy as a representative of the United Realms. “We can have yours professionally made,” Regina says from the other side of the dressing room door. “You don’t need to buy something off the rack.” 

“Yeah, I do,” Emma says. She still craves normalcy, even as she sinks deeper into Regina’s world. This is as far as she’ll go to compromise. “How’s this?” She opens the door so Regina can come in to zip the dress.

It’s a gown, long enough for a ballroom, a deep blue instead of the white that Snow has always favored for her. Regina had picked it out, and her eyes narrow when she slips into the dressing room and takes Emma in.

Emma swallows and turns to display her open back, and she feels a gentle finger trace her spine, down to the zipper, before Regina pulls it up. “You look beautiful,” Regina murmurs. “Much too young to be at your granddaughter’s quinceañera.” 

“Flatterer,” Emma says, leaning back into Regina’s side. Her head rests against Regina’s shoulder, and Regina turns to press a kiss to her lips.

They’ve been doing that a lot, kisses that can mean nothing at all, just like they’d done for the years before Emma’s wedding. Talking about it might break the spell, might mean that there will be no more kisses and a firm acknowledgement of what is not happening here, and Emma doesn’t dare to be the one to shatter it.

Officially, they don’t see each other again for a week or two. Emma sends Regina updates on her cactus, and Regina sends Emma ridiculous memes that take Emma by surprise. Unofficially, Regina walks past Emma’s lobby almost every day just to shoot her a smile, even though she’s supposed to be in various distant locales.

Unofficially, Emma  _ might  _ teleport to a few events that Regina has in the Land Without Magic, even if she has to wake up at four AM to make it to one in Germany and she doesn’t sleep the night that Regina is in Tokyo. She stands out too much at that one and gets noticed by the media, another mysterious Emma Swan sighting that they still haven’t puzzled through.

There are more events in New York than there had ever been when Emma had been avoiding Regina. Regina does a speech and a magic display in Madison Square Gardens, and Emma buys a ticket and sits in one of the back rows, feeling Regina’s magic whirling around the stage like an old friend. 

After, she wriggles through the crowd to the entrance to backstage, where crowds of people are clamoring to see Regina. Emma ducks past them, aiming for the door, when she’s stopped. “Hey! No one goes in here.” It isn’t one of Regina’s personal security guards, but one with the venue logo on his jacket.

“I’m–” Emma bites her lip. There’s a barrier around backstage, a magical force field to keep dangerous intruders out. She won’t be able to get to Regina any other way than this door. “I’m a–” 

“Hi, sorry,” Emma recognizes the voice before she sees the flash of red-brown hair. “Coming through. Hey, is Regina still in there?” 

It’s Juliana Gutierrez, of course, and the security guard’s eyes flicker with recognition. “Come on in,” he says gruffly. Juliana turns once to glance around at the crowd, and Emma shrinks back into the mass of people, unwilling to be seen.

She doesn’t try to get in again. There’s nothing she can say that will persuade the guard to let her in. Plenty of people claim to be Regina’s friends, she’s sure, and Emma’s supposed to be keeping a low profile, anyway. It’s just one door standing between them, but it feels insurmountable, and Emma shifts away from it and lets the crowd swallow her up again.

She sends Regina a message.  _ Those last few tricks were just you showing off. _

As always, the reply is immediate.  _ Are you here? _

Emma bites her lip.  _ Just watching from the livestream _ , she lies.  _ I figured you’d be busy. _ Busy with Juliana, of course, who breezes backstage to see Regina and is let in without a second glance. Regina might not be sharing anything about her relationship with Juliana, but Emma isn’t blind, and neither is the rest of the world.

And it shouldn’t matter, because Emma and Regina aren’t together. Because their kisses don’t  _ mean  _ anything and never have, because they aren’t good for each other and Emma knows it. Regina has a girlfriend now who she seems to care about and trust, who comes to her house when she’s sick and accompanies her to events and hasn’t been hiding from the world for three years. Emma can’t– doesn’t– measure up.

She’s best off letting go, but she still finds herself typing another message to Regina.  _ Want to stop by for dinner tonight? _

Regina says yes, and Emma is left scrambling to cook a dinner to impress her. She winds up making soup and a salad that she has to google and run to the store to buy ingredients for, and she’s waiting at the kitchen table when Regina appears in her living room. “This is nice,” Regina says.

“Don’t sound so surprised.” 

“You spent three years living in your mother’s loft,” Regina says, looking at the snug little living room with the couch and TV, and then the small kitchen with its table and two chairs. Lucy’s paintings are up on the walls, and Henry’s books are proudly displayed in the bookcase shelves on either side of the TV. Emma has put the cactus on the kitchen window, mostly to prove that she hasn’t killed it. “I was worried you might have skewed images of what was liveable.” 

“Thanks,” Emma says wryly. “You’re lucky I actually invited you this time or I might have kicked you out by now. Didn’t you come in to leave me all the…” She waves vaguely around at the cactus, at the empty vase on the windowsill, at the blanket that has found its way back to Emma’s couch. 

Regina shakes her head. “I just assumed you had a kitchen table and a couch and I sent them to them. I thought you’d manage as much.” She smiles at Emma, her face still a little flushed from the performance earlier. “I like it here. It suits you.” 

Insecurity rears its head, unexpectedly. “I’m sure you have a hotel room twice this size to go back to tonight.” 

“Three times, probably.” Regina crinkles her nose. “I’d rather be here.” Her hand lays down on top of Emma’s, and Emma’s heart skips a beat. 

And yeah,  _ okay _ , maybe she needs to stop telling herself that this is casual, because now she’s thinking about Juliana and Regina again and she can’t breathe, can’t tamp down the grief that springs to her eyes when she remembers them. Remembers that Regina has  _ someone _ , that this is just a diversion between friends. 

“Emma?” Regina is looking at her with worried eyes, and Emma schools her expression back to casual. “Is everything all right?” 

“Yeah,” Emma says, and she changes the topic to Lucy’s upcoming quinceañera, to Snow’s new obsession with line dancing, to the show earlier today, to anything but Juliana.

They talk for hours over soup– not the salad, because Emma had accidentally misread the dressing recipe and put in a tablespoon of salt instead of a teaspoon, and Regina still eats it with a strained smile on her face until Emma takes a bite and spits it out– and then move to the couch, flipping on a movie and curling up together under the blanket. 

They don’t watch it, and it’s late by the time Regina starts to doze off. “Long day,” she says apologetically. 

“I know.” Emma strokes her hair, feels its softness between her fingers, breathes. “Don’t worry about it. You can sleep here if you need.” 

Regina shakes her head. “No. I can’t– I can’t do that again,” she says. Emma doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but her eyes are wide suddenly, mournful and afraid. “I won’t–” 

Oh.  _ I can’t do that again _ , Regina says, and there’s only one  _ that  _ that comes to mind. The two of them entwined, falling asleep together, waking up together. Regina can’t do that again, of course, because she’s in a relationship, and Emma is only playing at one. “Yeah,” Emma says, forcing a smile. “Of course. Want me to teleport you back?” 

Regina shakes her head, studying Emma’s eyes, and then she lurches forward and kisses her. It’s no different than the other kisses, casual– except they’ve never been casual, Emma knows suddenly. Not for her, even if they’d been for Regina. They’ve never been peaceful and intimate and safe. 

They’ve been dangerous, and Emma knows that only because she can feel her heart clenching, tight enough that it’s about to shatter again. Emma closes her eyes, kisses Regina back, hard and not casual at all, parting her lips, slipping her tongue into Regina’s mouth, her hands trailing down Regina’s back as Regina gasps into her mouth. Emma trembles, kisses Regina harder, leaves all attempts at gentle behind, and when she finally pulls back, she’s blinking back tears.

Regina stares at her, and she whispers, as though she’s seeing Emma for the first time, “Emma?” 

Emma forces another smile, retreats back to her side of the couch. “Goodnight, Regina.” She doesn’t use her magic often, not when she can help it, but she teleports to the next room, disappearing and reappearing safely away from Regina. She hears the burst of energy from the next room, Regina following suit, and only then does she venture back out into the living room.

Regina has left the blanket behind, and Emma slides under it and curls against the side of the couch, and she lets herself cry then, at last.

* * *

She’d gotten in too deep again, had fallen in headfirst even when she’d known what she was doing, and she could fool herself for only so long before it would consume her. Her fight-or-flight instincts are activated now, and she pulls back.

At first, it’s just ignoring the painting that appears on her wall the next day, a small painting of Storybrooke that matches Lucy’s masterpieces perfectly. She doesn’t text Regina about it, doesn’t open a dialogue, and Regina doesn’t press.

Then it’s getting a text from Regina a few days later,  _ are you free this weekend? _

She responds to that, afraid of what Regina might think if she doesn’t.  _ I don’t have another day off for weeks, sorry. _ Politely casual, dismissive. Regina doesn’t respond to that, even to call her out on it. 

There are a few scattered invitations after that, carefully spaced apart so it’s obvious that Regina is puzzled but has gotten the message. Emma responds to decline, quietly miserable about it.

She misses Regina, misses her as desperately as she had back during those years when Henry had been in high school and they’d been at peace. She wakes up every morning and remembers abruptly who she’d lost again, and it’s enough to ruin her day. As much as she’d thought that she’d needed to do this, she hadn’t reckoned with how much it would hurt– both herself and Regina. 

She still loves Regina. She’d known it deep down, even though she’d refused to acknowledge it. She loves Regina, and it had broken her heart to finally grasp that Regina has moved on. And she’s going to throw herself into heartbreak again, and for what? To ruin something that Regina has chosen?

When she feels her resolve weakening, she torments herself, googling Regina and Juliana’s names together to find as many pictures as she can. She memorizes them, reads article after article of gossipy speculation until all she can think about is Regina in love with someone else, someone beautiful and famous and wealthy who can joke with the press instead of hiding from it, who accompanies Regina to formal events like she’d been born for them.

Regina has found someone perfect for her, and Emma is just a memory, a piece of her past that she’d had to reconcile on her journey.

There are moments when she thinks of something to tell Regina– moments when she’ll be talking to Lucy and marvel at how she’s grown, or when Snow will say something that Emma  _ knows _ Regina would gleefully consider asinine, or when she’ll be sitting on the subway and see something particularly egregious (a shirt with Regina’s familiar image, the fireball fitting perfectly on one breast)– and Emma has to remind herself that she’s  _ distancing _ , protecting herself from going through another heartbreak.

Regina, naturally, reaches her limit after a few more brushoffs. Emma sees her from across the street one day, striding toward Emma’s office building without any security and only her sunglasses as protection. It’s almost her lunch break, and Emma knows at once that Regina knows that. 

Regina isn’t going away.

She stands in front of the building, waiting by the door until Emma finally gives up and takes her lunch break. She steps outside. “Ma’am,” she says, trying to lighten her tone. “We’re getting some complaints inside about a suspicious individual lurking outside–” 

Regina takes off her glasses and looks at Emma, anguished, and Emma falls silent. “What did I do?” she whispers.

Emma shakes her head. “Regina, please.” She can’t do this here, in the middle of the street. “Can we just…” 

There are quieter one-way side streets and alleys that Emma likes to walk down when she calls Henry, and she leads Regina to an alley free of anyone squatting. It’s still filthy, smells like garbage, and not a place where she’d normally take Regina, but she doesn’t have a choice. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for us to spend time together,” she blurts out, rubbing her temples.

Regina stares at her, uncomprehending, and then it finally seems to dawn on her. “So we’re back to this?” she says grimly, and Emma can’t look her in the eye. “Of course. I shouldn’t have expected anything else. We live and die at the whims of Emma Swan.”

It’s sharp, caustic, and Emma can feel her own temper flare through the guilt. “And you’re back to victimizing yourself,” she shoots back, watching Regina take a step back. Of course, Regina, who has everything now– who has her family close by, the adulation of the people, the knowledge that she’s making a difference, a  _ lover _ – Regina would be the victim here, too, flawless and free of guilt. “Because that’s always the easiest way, huh? You don’t have to live with yourself if you find someone else to blame.” 

Regina’s eyes flash, dark and stormy, and Emma prepares herself for a string of words that will wound her and leave her bleeding on the ground. But Regina holds up a hand, takes a breath. “No,” she says, and she sounds strained but calm. “I am not doing this again.”

Emma falls silent, chastised. Regina shakes her head. “I was… _ so furious _ with you for so long for running away.” She enunciates each word, careful as she stares at Emma. “For giving up instead of…but I finally get it. It’s why I couldn’t…why I wouldn’t relive that morning with you again at your apartment.”

And Emma is afraid of what this coldly calm Regina will say, of what new injury she’ll inflict, but she can’t look away. “What?” 

And Regina’s mask falls, just like that, and reveals a face just as stricken as Emma’s. “If it’s a choice between us hurting each other and…and never seeing you again,” she whispers, “I’d choose exactly the same as you did.” 

Emma flinches. It’s what she wants, isn’t it? It’s what she’d been sure would be best. But when it’s phrased like that, it feels like another heartbreak, as lethal and painful as what they’d gone through on the morning after the coronation. “I’m sorry,” she says in a murmur. “I’m so sorry.” 

Regina watches her, eyes solemn and pleading. “I just wish you’d tell me what I did to make you feel this way.” 

Emma chokes on the words, traitorous tears threatening to return. “Nothing,” she manages. “You didn’t do a thing. This is…it’s all me, okay? I can’t do this. I don’t know how to…” 

She squeezes her eyes shut and feels, rather than sees, Regina slip her arms around her. She leans into them, feels as though she’s living in a dreamworld, as though none of this could possibly be real. Their foreheads are pressed together, and Emma is sure– if they could only have one more kiss– if they could only take another step forward and hold each other a little tighter– it might fix everything, might erase Regina’s girlfriend and years of miserable history, might rewrite coronation night or– even better, the day of her wedding, which is really when everything had gone so terribly wrong.

Instead, Regina steps away from her and turns to leave the alley, and Emma does the same.

And in front of them, at the edge of the alley, is a man with his iPhone camera pointed directly at them.


	5. Chapter 5

At first, Emma hears nothing about it. Regina isn’t texting her anymore, and they’d both teleported so quickly from that alley that they hadn’t spoken again. Emma checks the news, searches for her name, but finds only speculation. Whoever that man had been, he hadn’t released the video, and Emma breathes a sigh of relief on her third morning glancing through the news and finding nothing.

Then she opens the door to her apartment building and walks into chaos.

“Emma! Emma!” There are flashbulbs going off in front of her, microphones in her face. “Emma, is it true that you’re Regina Mills’s secret lover?”

“Emma, tell us about Storybrooke!”

“Emma, where have you been?” 

“Emma, has Regina been cheating on Juliana Gutierrez with you?” 

“Emma, why have you been hiding out here?” 

There’s a throng of people in front of her, all jostling each other to get closer to her, and it’s too damn early for this. Emma does what anyone would in her situation: she sticks up a middle finger, steps back inside, slams the door, and magics herself two blocks away to the train station. 

There’s a guy half passed out on the bench in front of her, blinking at her abrupt appearance in bewilderment, and Emma gives him a tight nod. “Morning.” 

He doesn’t miss a beat, tips his chin, and says, “Morning,” right back.

The media has found her workplace, too, and she has to call the agency for backup to get rid of the reporters haranguing every person who enters the building. She ignores them from the lobby, busying herself with work and her phone as she finds the stories that she hadn’t seen on the news.

The video had broken in the middle of the night on Twitter, and she’s  _ trending _ . Her name– with the little  _ related _ subscript adding on  _ Regina Mills _ and  _ Juliana Gutierrez _ – and she might not have made it to filmed media this morning, but she’d made it to Internet infamy. There are more pictures appearing by the moment: snapshots of her blinking owlishly at the paparazzi outside her apartment as she gives them the finger; photos of her sitting on the train today, tuned out to the world; and photo after photo of her through the windows of the lobby, greeting workers with a strained smile.

She gets a text from Lucy.  _ You have maybe two hours before Twitter decides if you’re the hero of the day or the villain.  _ Then, a considering pause, followed by,  _ I mean, everyone winds up the villain eventually _ .

_ Thanks, Lucy. Love you too _ . She puts her phone away, lest  _ EMMA SWAN AN INATTENTIVE SECURITY GUARD!  _ is tomorrow’s headline.

Now that the world seems close to gleaning who she is, Emma doesn’t bother trying to venture out onto the street at the end of the day. She walks to the door, stares down a kid with a camera who’s hovering close to the exit, and disappears in a puff of silver air. She reappears in her apartment, and when she peers down from the window, she can see the crowd still there.

She sits down and breathes out a sigh of discontent. 

The stress of the video being out there has given her a few days of reprieve from thinking too much about Regina, and now that it’s made its way into the world, Regina consumes her again. She eats dinner in a fugue state, longs for Regina with quiet, pressing intensity. They hadn’t started anything, but this feels more like a breakup than it ever has before. 

The worst part is that they’d been angling closer toward  _ friendship _ than ever before, in the most conventional way. They hadn’t been at each other’s throat. They hadn’t been trying to hurt each other like way back when Henry had been ten and the curse had loomed over them. They’d just been…spending time together. Chatting. Letting the misery of their last year together fade away in favor of something fresh and new and good.

And if Emma hadn’t been in love with Regina, well, maybe it could have lasted. 

She’d fucked it up. No matter how defensive she’d gotten when Regina had said so, she knows that it’s all on her this time. Last time, she’d wholly blamed Regina for keeping the truth from her, for waiting until she wouldn’t have to fight for Emma at all. This time, she’d sprung this onto Regina without warning or explanation, and it’s entirely because Emma can’t handle a friendship with Regina, just like Snow had said. 

She wants to apologize to Regina, to explain herself and take the blame, but she knows where that ends. Regina guilty, screwing up her new relationship because she’s always sacrificed everything for Emma. Or worse– the budding friendship beginning again, and Emma enduring heartbreak after heartbreak for it. 

God, she  _ hates  _ thinking. She whirls around to find a book, a movie, desperate to find something to do other than dwell on Regina, and she turns on the TV, flipping from channel to channel. It’s late, and there isn’t much on. A Simpsons episode, a cop show, Zelena, a teen show–

_ Wait _ . Emma clicks back a channel. It’s one of a myriad of late night shows, and that is  _ definitely  _ Zelena onscreen. “–Not that I was around for it, but I heard it was traumatic,” she drawls, laying a hand on the host’s arm. “Regina just crushed that heart like  _ that _ .” She snaps her fingers. “Decades together, and no remorse. You have to admire that ruthlessness.”

The host looks like he does not at all admire said ruthlessness. Zelena peers at him. “Oh, don’t act so scandalized. Who hasn’t killed a man in their time?” She wrinkles her nose in thought. “Well, I suppose Emma killed a woman. A jolly time, really.” 

Emma watches in alarm. “Emma!” The host seizes onto her name like a lifeline. “Please, tell us a little more about this mysterious Emma. You say that she was in Storybrooke until the realms were united?” 

“And a little after. I wasn’t there much– married the blandest man in the universe–” She smiles and waves. “Hello, honey! Anyway, we were living in married bliss while Regina and Emma were fighting like cats and dogs. I’ve never seen two women more incapable of handling their gooey, disgusting feelings.” 

The host pounces. “Feelings?” 

Emma finally pulls herself together enough to grab her phone, dialing a number that she hasn’t in three years. It doesn’t occur to her until after Zelena picks up the phone that Zelena is on live TV, with only a brief lag. “Here she is now!” Zelena says brightly on the other line, clearly on speaker.

Emma says, “What the  _ fuck _ , Zelena?” 

“Don’t be so cranky. I’m helping you, darling.” Onscreen, Zelena’s phone has just begun to ring, and she looks at it and says, “Speak of the devil,” as she hangs up in real time.

Emma is bleeped by the censors a few seconds later, and Zelena hangs up and shakes her head. “The thing you need to know about Emma Swan was that she barged into my sister’s town and tried to steal her son. Oh, and that she was the savior, I suppose.” She rolls her eyes. “Boring and noble. Though I did prefer that to when she tried to kill me and give my daughter to Regina.” She presses her hand to her heart. “Still, you have to admire that devotion.”

Yet again, the host does not look like he admires Emma’s devotion. 

* * *

By morning, Emma is on the covers of newspapers and still trending on Twitter. Zelena hadn’t done her any favors, and she’s been labeled  **_THE HOMICIDAL BABY THIEF HIDING IN REGINA’S CLOSET_ ** by the New York Post. She has to teleport to work again, but this time, she’s met by the boss of her agency. “We just think you’d be better off taking a sabbatical,” he says delicately. “You seem to be under a lot of stress at home.” 

It isn’t a  _ paid  _ sabbatical, of course, and she grits her teeth and finds a quiet place to hide down by Battery Park. A few teenagers gape at her with recognition, and she says pleasantly, “Don’t worry, I only kidnap kids when I’m hungry.” They scatter, and Emma goes for a run before they can report her whereabouts to Twitter.

For the first time, she’s beginning to get a sense of what it is that Regina’s been enduring for the past four years. Wherever she goes, someone looks at her as though they know exactly who she is, and even eight million people in New York aren’t enough to give her the anonymity that she craves. 

Lucy’s quinceañera is in two weeks, and she’s already called Emma and suggested apologetically that she come in disguise. “ _ I _ think it’s dumb,” she says. “But Mom will kill us if we ruin the quinceañera with more of…you know.” 

Emma knows. The messages have gotten more and more garbled over the day. By nighttime, she’s Regina’s nemesis who’d cursed the town into Storybrooke. Someone gets wind of her brief stint as the Dark One, and Rumple’s history is attributed to her. There are strangers who swear that she’s been stalking the streets of Queens every night, killing off homeless people like she’s some kind of modern-day Jack the Ripper, and that catches on quickly.

When asked for comment, Zelena shrugs expansively and says, “I don’t know what Emma gets up to these days,” which is as good as confirmation for social media. 

Emma calls her a few days later, safely hidden deep in a park on Long Island. It’s more private than her apartment, where she’s seen at least three drones trying to snap pictures by the window. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Feeding the media shitstorm like that?”

Zelena laughs. “Quite. It’s been a laugh, hasn’t it? These reporters will believe anything. And I don’t even have to lie!” She sounds delighted about that. 

Zelena, Emma knows, thrives on chaos. “You could maybe not make me sound like I’m a secret axe murderer?” Emma suggests tiredly. “It’s only a matter of time before the cops show up at my apartment.” 

“Oh, no,” Zelena says comfortingly. “It was across state lines. It’ll be the FBI. Or that new agency that’s supposed to take care of inter-realm crime.” 

“Zelena,” Emma says weakly, “ _ Why? _ ” 

When Zelena speaks next, the air of friendliness is gone, and she sounds dead serious. “Perhaps if you hadn’t hurt my sister  _ again _ , I might have been more charitable.” 

_ Oh _ . Emma stops walking, her blood running cold. “She told you about that.” 

Zelena laughs, light and airy again. “Oh, and I’m sure you’ll thank me later. After all, I’ve put her in the unenviable position of defending  _ you _ .” She snickers, then again, her voice free of amusement, “Don’t you dare squander it again.” 

“Right,” Emma says, clenching her fists. “Look, Zelena– just stay out of it next time, okay? Regina will be fine. She has– she’s doing fine. And I’m going to have to disappear again.” New York has been lonely, but it’s been her  _ home _ , and she doesn’t know where she can go next where she might not be recognized. Emma is on her own, as always.

Zelena laughs a mocking laugh. “You don’t like how this is going for you? Then do something about it,” she says. “Hiding away from the action never suited you, anyway.” She hangs up, and Emma is left uncertain if Zelena is trying to sabotage her or help her. With Zelena, those tend to be the same.

She packs up and gets into the Bug, driving back to the garage near her house where it’s kept. Thankfully, she’s been careful enough that she can travel in this one way without being recognized, and she’s gotten so accustomed to her brief anonymity that she can park at the garage and then teleport back home. She holds up her hands, calling her magic, and nothing happens.

Weird. Again, she calls her magic and feels it rise in response, but when she tries to teleport home, she’s unable to get there. It’s like there’s a big blank spot where she’s trying to go, and nothing will let her touch it. 

Sighing, she starts the walk back home. She gets a few dirty looks, but she keeps her head high, teeth gritted as she awaits the chaos at her apartment. 

Some of the paparazzi has given up on finding her there, but others remain, and now she has conspiracy theorist protesters as well. Their shouts reach up to her apartment sometimes, and she can hear them as they accuse her of killing babies and stealing away Regina and…whatever else it is that she’s been allegedly doing wrong lately. 

Today, they have a new toy, a strange contraption pointed at her apartment that must be the thing blocking her magic there. Emma presses her lips together, watching them from afar, and she closes her eyes and lets a disguise ripple over her skin.  _ Perfect _ . “Sorry,” she mumbles to the mob as she pushes through them. “I live up there–” 

“Really?” the pap she’s bumped into turns to look at her in interest. “What’s it like sharing an apartment building with the infamous Emma Swan?” 

“Excuse me,” she mumbles again, pushing past her. She makes it nearly through the crowd when an odd feeling spreads across her, and someone lets out a yell.

“There she is!”

She must have stepped into the dampening field that is blocking her magic. Mind woozy, she tries to push forward, the front door in sight. “Emma!” someone is shouting. “Why aren’t you in prison?” 

“How do you sleep at night?” 

“Where are the babies?” Another voice, shriller, and hands seizing at her. Emma tries to sidestep them and misses, her head still fuzzy from whatever they’ve pointed at the building. There are news cameras on her, streaming live video of her stumbling around while conspiracy theorists converge on her, and she wants to snap something and run, but she can’t seem to manage it–

She zeroes in on the little black machine set up on a tripod, emanating the dampening field from it, and she swings her fists and kicks hard and forces her way to it. A gangly pale-faced boy tries to seize it before she gets to it, but Emma punches him in the gut, grabs the contraption, and slams it onto the floor.

It shatters, and Emma jams the tripod onto it a few times, too, for good measure. Her magic floods back to her, and she’s so, so sick and tired of the mob around her at all times. They converge on her again, and she takes a leaf out of Regina’s book and draws a fireball to her palm.

It glows white-hot, and the crowd backs away, tripping over each other in their haste to escape her. There are cameras on her, filming and live-streaming this incident to anyone who cares, and Emma turns to face them. “Hey,” she says, her jaw set. “I think I’m kind of done with this. You want to know who I am? Maybe try to ask a little more nicely.”

A reporter rushes forward. “I’m from RealmStyle Magazine, and we’re covering–” 

Emma blows him aside with a wave of her hand, out of patience. “ _ Nicely _ ,” she repeats.

The crowd eyes her warily. Emma waits. She isn’t sure what she’s doing, except that she’s angry and frustrated and– and a part of her has been waiting, hoping for Regina to step up and say something. But Regina has been silent.

A girl sticks up her hand, and Emma breathes. “You,” she says.

The girl looks at her, eyes flickering from the reporter Emma had blown away to Emma’s face. “Who  _ are  _ you?” she asks. There’s no more hostility in her voice, just curiosity. 

Emma walks forward, to the steps up to the apartment building. There’s an old, rusted lawn chair on its small porch, and she sits down on it. No one stops her.

For the first time since she’d been discovered, she finally feels like she’s doing this on her own terms. “I was found on the side of the road in Maine,” she begins, news cameras on her and eyes fixed onto her. 

She wonders if, somewhere across the realms, Regina is watching, too.

* * *

Of all the things that Emma hadn’t expected to savor, showing up at Lucy’s quinceañera without a disguise is at the top of that list. But it’s a pleasure to be able to drive toward the portal at Wall Street and smile guardedly at the press. She’s been getting offers to appear on talk shows and do interviews, and she’s turned down every one. Slowly, the media has been getting the message, and no one congregates outside her apartment anymore. People slow when they walk past her lobby, snap pictures that she pretends she doesn’t see, but she’s left alone.

Regina wrangles the press as though she’d been born for it. “Emma is a dear friend of mine,” she says, and there is no sign of tension in her voice. “It took us a long time to get there.” She talks about Henry’s adoption for the first time, talks about the curse and the savior with such plain words that her sins rise and fall with the story. “She believed in me when no one else did, and she pushed me to be a better person at every juncture.” She smiles onscreen, her eyes soft and distant, and Emma hangs on to her every word.

And then her eyes harden. “But to reduce her only to a bit player in my story is a disservice to the most phenomenal hero I’ve ever met,” she says, and Emma’s eyes blur. 

The interviewer says, “I have to ask this,” apologetically, and Regina shakes her head and looks unsurprised at the next question. “The way that you speak about Emma Swan…would you characterize your relationship as romantic?” 

A shadow crosses Regina’s face. “No,” she says flatly.

The interviewer says, her voice light, “Are you sure?” They both laugh, though Regina’s is strained to Emma’s ears. There is something raw in it, hard and hurt and bare of affection, and Emma has been dreading seeing her ever since. 

She skips out on the early preparation for the quinceañera, which sounds as elaborate as the lead-up to a wedding. “Nails, hair, makeup,” Jacinda had told her briskly on the phone. “Lucy is bringing Olive, but otherwise it’s just family.”  _ Just family _ , meaning Jacinda, Tiana, Regina, Snow, Zelena, Robin, and Alice. Family is a lot bigger than it had been back in Storybrooke the first time. “No one else in the room.” She says it significantly, which probably means that Juliana won’t be there.

It doesn’t matter anymore. “I just don’t think I’m going to be able to make it so early,” Emma had said apologetically, and Jacinda had been annoyed but hidden it well. 

“Just be there for pictures,” she’d said, and Emma is determined not to let her down on that, at least, despite the massive traffic jam in Storybrooke Station. The station is packed with strangers hurrying in for the party, and their security teams alone slow Emma down even more. There is a block on teleportation in the station, and Emma has to get out of the traffic jam and security checks to make it close enough to magic her way to the party.

She honks and gets only dirty looks. Lucy is going to  _ kill  _ her. Jacinda is going to do even worse. Here she is, five blocks away from Town Hall, and she’s stalled. It’s ridiculous. And finally, she has enough.

She parks her car in an illegal spot on the side of the road, and she climbs out of the car, puts on her heels, and starts down the walkway toward the exit. “Hey!” a man in sunglasses barks out at her. “What do you think you’re doing?” 

“I have to go,” she says breathlessly, striding past him.

Whoever he works for, it must be someone big. A few more men join him, blocking Emma’s path, and Emma has to fight the urge to blast them out of her way. “We all have to go,” the man sneers. “You’re not special just because you’re some…” He looks her up and down, unimpressed with her ballgown and her carefully done hair and makeup. “Some little princess from an enchanted forest. This is the real world, lady, and you’ll wait on line like every dignitary here.”

“No,” a crisp voice says, and Emma looks up, startled, and comes face-to-face with Regina. “She will not.” Regina is resplendent in a shimmery silver that seems to reflect the colors around her, her hair done up beneath a tiara and her eyes cold as they sweep over the guard. “This woman is with me.” She watches the guard instead of Emma, giving her only a glancing look before she returns to her new foe.

He stumbles over his words. “Queen Regina! I can’t tell you what an honor it is to…” He tries again under her glare. “You’re my daughter’s hero–” Regina doesn’t budge. “Of course, she can move past,” he says meekly. “I’ll have my people move aside to let her car through.” 

Regina inclines her head, offering the man grace at last. “Thank you for your assistance,” she says, and she leads the way back to Emma’s car. Emma has to hurry to catch up to her, and she hears the sharp intake of breath from Regina beside her.

She turns, confused, and sees Regina staring at the Bug as though she’s seen a ghost. “Regina?” 

“It’s just…it’s been a long time,” Regina murmurs, and she ducks into the passenger seat and takes a breath as though she’s greeting an old friend. Emma drives, the traffic jam parting in front of her. “Jacinda sent me,” Regina says, staring straight out of the windshield. “She was worried you weren’t going to make it in time.” 

“Thanks,” Emma says quickly– too quickly, her stomach lurching as though she’d just fallen from a great distance.

Regina shrugs. “Jacinda would have lost her mind if you’d missed pictures,” she says, and her voice is terse now, the tension between them suffusing the car. 

“I meant thanks for doing the interviews,” Emma clarifies, feeling awkward and unsure. “The ones where you let the world know that I didn’t suck as much as Zelena had implied I did.” 

“I told the truth,” Regina says, and she sounds equally discomfited. “You may not like me very much, but I know who you are. The world should know the truth–” 

“I may not like you?” Emma echoes. “ _ I may not like you _ ?” And it infuriates her still that Regina can intentionally find the worst meanings in Emma’s actions, can listen to the same pronouncement as the rest of the world and hear something else. “God, Regina, you’re so– so–” 

She swallows it back before she can say something cutting, and Regina looks sharply at her. “What?” she demands, belligerent now, and Emma can’t drive directly to Town Hall now, not when they’re both on the verge of another fight. She turns right on Main Street, cruises down the road in the other direction, her hands clenched around the steering wheel. 

“Nothing,” she says, and she takes a breath, reminds herself of Regina’s last words to her in that alley. “I’m also…I don’t want to go back to that year. I don’t want us to hurt each other anymore. So I’m going to leave it. Okay?” 

Regina gives her silent acquiescence, and Emma decides  _ to hell with it _ a moment later and snaps, “It’s like you never once listened to me when I told you I loved you,” she says, and it bursts from her in naked vulnerability, in despair of a grudge held for too long.

Regina grits her teeth. “Not this again.” But she looks as uncomfortable as she does angry, as guilty as her words say otherwise. “It’s been  _ four years _ , Emma.” 

“It was more with  _ him _ ,” Emma whispers, and she flushes, already regretting bringing it up. But Regina has turned to stare at her, and Emma forges on, lost in the hurt that had once guided her entire life for years. “All those years spent just…trying to convince myself that this was it. That this was the only way I could ever be loved– by someone who wanted me as a prize to be won and owned. Years of being stifled, of…of having to prove, over and over again, a love that was never enough for him.  _ Years _ of believing that I just wasn’t cut out for happiness–” 

“Do you think it was a cake walk for me?” Regina demands, and her voice cracks as she speaks. “That I _ enjoyed  _ seeing you with him? Do you think I don’t know that it was more than that with him? That I don’t remember years of…of stealing kisses and knowing none of it never meant a thing to you?” 

And this is is  _ typical _ , so  _ Regina _ that Emma wants to scream. “Stop putting words into my mouth,” she bites out. “Stop telling me how I felt. I told you! I told you again and again, and you never  _ listened _ –” She takes a breath, jerks the car around in an illegal U-turn and drives back to Town Hall. “You know what? Fine. Forget it. It was my fault, anyway, for going through with the–” She stops abruptly.

Regina is silent, and Emma is relieved. They might still be squabbling over the same quarrels of years ago, but they’ve changed in this one way: they think before they go too far. It’s better this time, even if it’s still quiet agony. And nothing she can say now won’t end in her pushing Regina off a ledge; or worse: another confession.

Emma jerks the car into an illegal U-turn and drives back to Town Hall in silence, and she says, her voice unnaturally loud in the silent car, “We’re here.” 

She kills the engine, unbuckles. A hand lands on hers, and Regina never turns to face her, stares out of the car at the paparazzi who take pictures of them sitting in the car and never catch Regina’s hand beneath their line of sight. “I’m sorry,” Regina whispers. “I caused us both…I caused so much suffering that I’d never meant to. And I’m sorry for that.” 

“Yeah,” Emma says, and she wishes that Regina had said it earlier, four years ago, when it might have made a difference. She wishes that she could hear it and wipe away everything, except that it has been four years and Regina still doesn’t understand. Except that Regina has moved on and their lives are different now, and nothing changes now except that Emma is alone now for her sake. 

Except, except, except. 

They’re never going to work through what went wrong, because there is no path out of this that doesn’t end with Emma screwing up Regina’s happy ending– which has never been Emma herself, and she’s trying to face reality at last– and as furious as Emma might get at Regina, she knows that Regina doesn’t deserve that.

It is still so very important to Emma that Regina is happy.

She steps out of the car to camera flashes and calls of her name, and she turns away from them and doesn’t look back. 

Lucy’s party is in Town Hall, which is the only place in town that can fit the sheer number of people who are attending the event. The building has been expanded for the inter-realm events that are held in Storybrooke on a weekly basis, and the back lawn where Emma had once taken a chainsaw to a piece of Regina’s apple tree is larger and more expansive now. That’s where she finds the rest of her family, gathered around the apple tree as they wait for the photographer to finish with Lucy’s individual pictures.

Snow hurries to meet her, face shining. “You look beautiful,” she says, David beaming behind her. “I’ve never seen you in such a rich color. It suits you.” 

“Thanks, Mom.” Emma shifts, uncomfortable, and finds Regina back in the gaggle of ballgowns as though she’d never left. She’s chatting with Robin, an arm around her shoulders as they talk. She doesn’t look at Emma, and Emma turns away from her to open her arms for Lucy.

“Grandma Emma!” Emma spins her around like she’s ten again, and Lucy laughs breathlessly. “I’ve been waiting for you. You didn’t come earlier–” She turns to Olive, who is tall and pretty and almost definitely the girl who’d called Lucy  _ babe _ that one time. “She’s afraid of my other grandmother,” Lucy says in a stage whisper. Emma pauses from glaring at Olive to glare at Lucy instead.

Olive bobs her head knowingly. “Divorce is rough on everyone,” she says. 

“I’m– We’re not divorced!” Emma sputters.

Olive raises an eyebrow. “Even rougher.” 

“No, I–” Emma shakes her head in renewed frustration. “Never mind. Are we doing pictures now?” 

“Almost done. The photographer wants some family ones that we needed you for.” Lucy makes her way back to the apple tree, head high, and the others gather around her. 

To Emma’s relief, she’s put on the opposite side of the photograph as Regina for the group pictures, and she’s sure she’s safe right up until the photographer snaps his fingers and says, “Okay. Grandmas, with Lucy.” 

Snow, Emma’s new favorite person, tugs David into the picture. Emma’s smiles are rictus stretches now, lips spread wide and teeth bared and her eyes desperate and lost. She still hasn’t made eye contact with Regina, and she wonders if she might make it through the day without managing it again. 

“Grandma Blonde!” the photographer barks out. “Smile like you mean it.” Emma darts one glance at Regina, her teeth gleaming and her eyes on the photographer, and she forces another smile. “Good.” The photographer consults his list. “Now let’s pull out the great-grandparents. We need one with just the two of you.” He jerks his head at Emma and Regina. 

Emma takes a step back. “No, you don’t.” 

It’s Lucy who turns on her, eyes flashing. “Yes, I do,” she says. “I’m tired of this. It’s either the two of you sneaking around and pretending like it’s not happening or it’s this thing where you act like the other doesn’t exist.” Emma closes her eyes, thoroughly humbled. When she opens them, Lucy is still scowling at her. “Do you know how many times I’ve gotten to hang out with both of you?  _ Twice _ .  _ Ever.  _ I’m not hanging separate pictures on my wall and painting double canvases! I’m done.” 

She whirls around to stab a finger at Regina, who is staring at her with an unfathomable expression. “And you– I get that my quinceañera has to be all about everyone paying respects to the Good Queen.  _ Fine _ . But I want this one thing in return. So can we all just…act like adults here and take a picture?” 

Her fierce look falters at their silence, fading away into pleading, and Emma is taken back to Henry at fourteen, trying to destroy magic so his mothers would stop fighting. “Yeah,” she says, subdued. “Yeah, of course.” 

They get into position on either side of Lucy, and they’re standing close enough that Regina’s hand brushes against Emma’s while they smile. Emma aches, Regina’s breath coming in slow, stuttering exhales beside her, and Emma knows that she won’t recover from today for a long, long time.

The camera clicks once, twice, and there are other cameras clicking, too, paparazzi who’ve been lurking just off of the property and snapping pictures. Emma’s sure that the media will analyze their body language, that it’ll be another few issues of tabloid gossip for them, but she doesn’t care. Today isn’t about them.

Not that it’s all that about Lucy, either. “Can’t I just make my appearance and let people approach me?” she complains after the photographs are finished. “Who cares about the queen of…” 

“England,” Snow supplies, patting Lucy’s shoulder.

“Whatever.” Lucy makes a face. “That isn’t even a monarchy.” She’s dressed in her mother’s old ballgown, light blue and fitted to her. “At least I’ll probably be drunk by then.” 

“ _ Lucia _ –” Jacinda says threateningly. 

Under the tree, Zelena and Tiana are already drinking, and Emma is tempted to join them. 

* * *

The quinceañera, Jacinda has explained to Emma before, is very similar to a custom from her native land. Lucy has taken advantage of that to reinvent the party where she can– which, thus far, seems to mean only that she can have a girl escort. Said girl is Olive, smiles at Lucy like she’s definitely had her tongue in her mouth, and Emma watches her warily as they descend a staircase into the ballroom. 

It’s a relief when Henry steps forward to dance with Lucy instead. The music shifts to a slow waltz, and Lucy tucks herself into her father’s embrace, whispering something to him as she sways. He laughs, and Emma watches them and lets herself forget the rest of the world for a little while.

Lucy dances with her mother next, then Tiana, and the rest of the dance floor begins to fill up. The dignitaries from the Land Without Magic look delighted at the ball, unlike anything they’ve ever seen before, and everyone else just looks relieved to fall into the usual dancing. Emma hangs back, watching her parents dancing like they’ve only just fallen in love.  _ Ugh. _

She can’t help herself as her eyes shift. She’s drawn to Regina by nature, by that invisible thread that she’s tried time and again to sever. Even in a crowded ballroom, her eyes keep moving and moving until they find Regina and hold. Regina is dancing with Juliana, murmuring something to her with their heads close together, and Juliana strokes her cheek and then twirls her, grinning.

Emma slides over to the other side of the table, where Henry is eyeing a bottle of wine mournfully. “I think…I’m pretty sure that I’m old now,” he says, and Emma notices that the bottle is very close to empty. “When the  _ fuck _ did that happen?” 

“Sometime around when I let you say  _ fuck  _ in front of me,” Emma says dryly. “Imagine how I feel.” 

Henry blinks at her. “You were pregnant and in jail at  _ seventeen _ . That’s two years older than Lucy. You were a  _ baby _ .” 

“Yep.” Emma slides the bottle over to her place. “Don’t worry. I’m still seventeen years older than you and I haven’t gotten my shit together. You’re miles ahead of me.” 

“It’s more like three years these days.” Henry takes a long drink. “Why can’t our family age like regular people? I feel like I’m going to blink and Lucy’s going to wind up in some wormhole and–” 

“Show up ten years older with a wife and kid?” Emma suggests, tipping back her glass. “That one’s always fun.”

Henry shrugs. “It’s the family tradition at this point. Look at them.” He jabs a finger at where Lucy and Olive are dancing. “Look at her. You know who she is? Olive Twist. Like, actual Olive Twist from the Land of Untold Stories. She’s a  _ thief _ .” 

“That’s family tradition, too.” Emma finishes her glass, reaches for the bottle, discovers that Henry has finished it. Another bottle is at the middle of the table, and Emma uses a burst of magic to bring it over. “Shouldn’t you be dancing with your wife or something?” 

Henry snorts. “She’s been dancing with Tiana for the past four dances. I don’t get in the way of that.” He tilts his head, a goofy-in-love smile wiping away his melancholy as he watches Jacinda and Tiana. “Not to sound too much like Gran, but you know what else runs in this family?”

Emma holds up a hand. “If you say  _ true love– _ ” 

Henry says, “True love.” 

“Stop.” Emma pours herself another glass of wine. “I don’t need–”

Henry peers at her, then sighs, serious and a little drunk. “You know,” he says. “I expected it from Mom, but not from you. I should have known.” 

“What?” 

He shrugs, the wine loosening his tongue enough that he doesn’t bother to censor himself. “You know that martyring yourself like this doesn’t make you noble, right? Just selfish.” 

Emma flinches. “I’m not  _ martyring  _ myself.” The accusation is laughable, when all she’s done is retreated to protect herself, and she knows she’s about to share too much to defend herself. “Maybe it’s selfish to…to want to stay away from your mom when she has someone else, but I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m trying to give her what she wants instead of getting in the way.”

“Yeah,” Henry says, staring into his glass. Abruptly, he looks up, his eyes sharp past his stupor, and says, “So why are you still so pissed at Mom for doing the same thing?” 

It hits with all the finesse of a sledgehammer, jolts something inside of Emma with so much fury that she’s left helpless at the blow. Henry is still watching her, waiting for a response with his head cocked and his eyes clear, and Emma can only think to say, “Oh.” 

It’s been years of hurt, years of certainty that she hadn’t been enough for Regina, and she’d never paused to consider exactly what– exactly how much self-loathing and insecurity must have motivated Regina’s decision to stay quiet. She’d  _ loathed _ Emma’s ex, had thought him entirely unworthy of her and–  _ do you think it was a cake walk for me? _ – and she’d still–

“I thought that she was being a coward,” Emma says, casting an eye across the dance floor. Regina is dancing with one of the princes of Rohan, now, polite and amenable, and Juliana is leaning against the wall nearby and chatting with Alice as she waits for Regina to finish. “I’m not– I don’t think that Regina and Juliana are as mismatched as I was with Hook.” 

Henry raises his eyebrows. “Yeah,” he says, ignoring half of what she’s said. “I guess you’d have to be a coward to tell yourself that someone else might be better suited for Mom than you.” Emma swallows, suddenly a little nauseous from the wine. Henry cocks his head. “I’m gonna get a free pass on all of this later, right? Just very drunk, obviously.” 

Emma looks at him askance. “Are you even drunk?” 

Henry glances at the dance floor, takes in Olive and Lucy dancing a little too close to be proper, and says, “Not nearly enough.”

Juliana and Regina have returned to the dance floor, and Emma stands abruptly. Her pulse is thrumming in her ears, and she can feel the heat that rises through her, building on adrenaline. She weaves through the crowd until she reaches Regina, and she stands still for a moment, staring at her back as she dances. 

Juliana sees her first, and she smiles, an easy one that is sharp with recognition. Emma had expected her to be soft and warm, gentle in the way that Regina can be, but Juliana is spiky edges and amusement, and she dances Regina away from Emma with nothing more than a wink.

“Wait,” Emma says before they can move too far away, and Regina stops dancing. “Can I– can I cut in?” 

There are cameras on them, Emma knows, the media located around the room and sending their reports back to cyberspace. There are eyes on them, watching as Regina turns and Emma puts stiff hands on her sides. They sway together, awkward and uncertain, and a few hundred people watch them in the midst of the crowd.

Regina’s hand rests on Emma’s side, but she doesn’t look at her, and her motions are hard and quick. She dances quickly, faster than Emma can keep up with, and Emma stumbles after her and feels breathless, caught in her undertow. Regina’s face is hard, unyielding, and Emma follows her movements and hangs onto Regina’s free hand for dear life.

Regina moves faster, angrier, and Emma takes a breath and remembers a dozen dancing lessons over the years, back when David had been determined to redefine their father-daughter experiences two decades late. She isn’t a delicate, bumbling disaster– or she’d rather not think that she is. She can move like this, can match Regina, as she once did as a personal mission.

She doesn’t give up. She speeds up, dances a little more recklessly, a little more confidently. Regina’s eyes narrow and she ups the tempo, a little spark of magic behind her movements, and Emma feels the magic and feeds it with her own. They’re moving faster now, Emma beginning to keep up, and they are a frenzy of movements, of flashing blue and silver fabric, of blonde hair that streams from Emma and the brown hair coming loose from Regina’s tiara. 

And in the midst of their whirlwind, Regina finally meets Emma’s eyes. Emma skips a step, barely manages to keep up, stunned at the ravine of grief that lurks within Regina’s gaze. “Regina,” she whispers, a breath as silent as the whisper of their dresses against the floor. “Can we talk?” 

Regina’s lips twist. “I don’t want to talk,” she says.

And Emma wants to argue– to point out that if they can never function while talking, if their talks always end in bitterness, then how can anything be resolved if they don’t work through that? Except that they have. Except that they’ve both learned to defuse, and they’ve pulled themselves out of that cavernous pit where all their conversations had ended in bitterness long ago. And she thinks she’s finally beginning to understand Regina, too.

“Okay,” Emma murmurs, one hand on Regina’s back and the other tangled in hers, and she draws Regina to her and kisses her. 

There is a moment– a split second, when Emma begins to pull Regina in and Regina tenses– when Emma relaxes her grasp, waits for Regina to pull away instead. But Regina moves in without hesitation, and Emma thinks–  _ it’s been so many years and I am so tired of being alone _ – and then there are Regina’s lips on hers, the world glowing around them as everything becomes just them.

Regina kisses like the wind, fierce and all-consuming, and Emma is whisked away within her. Emma trembles, her fingers rising to graze Regina’s cheek, pressed to her and incapable of thinking of anything else. 

Except for one thing, suddenly and unpleasantly. “Break up with your girlfriend,” she whispers against Regina’s lips.

Regina laughs, a breath on Emma’s breath. “Okay,” she says.

Emma blinks, her eyes very close to Regina’s. “That easy?” 

Regina kisses her again, long and slow, and Emma is dazed by it, is so gone that she barely notices the cameras and the whispers through the ballroom. “And if I were, in fact, dating the straight girl  _ playing me  _ in a movie, it would still be that easy. Idiot,” she adds, as Emma stares at her, stunned. “Is  _ that  _ why you ghosted me?”

Emma chokes on her response. “Who taught you about ghosting?” Regina just rests her head against Emma’s shoulder, angling it to point to someone beyond them. 

Lucy stands a few feet away, one finger jabbed at them, and she says, “So…are we kissing secret girlfriends now or–” 

“ _ No _ ,” Emma and Regina say together, and the world feels a bit like it’s been tilted on its axis and then set in place again, exactly as it should have been. 

* * *

_ Once Upon a Time  _ is a blockbuster event with a red carpet premiere, and Emma could do without the whole thing. Well, all but Regina clad in a long black dress that clings to her every curve, her eyes gleaming behind dark makeup as she smiles for the media. Emma stands a little to the side, back out of the limelight, and there are few pictures taken of her. She’s gotten good at avoiding the camera angles that the media favors, out of sight when Regina’s face is being blasted to the world, and she reunites with her after the pause on the red carpet. 

“Sorry about that,” Regina mutters to her. “I know you’d rather just teleport in.” 

Emma snorts. “I would have, except then we’d have to put up with a dozen new tabloid articles about how we’re broken up.” She shrugs. “I can handle the media. And we had to make an appearance here. It’s your movie.” 

“Indeed,” Regina says, pursing her lips. “Though we have seen it before.” 

“Too many times,” Emma says ruefully. They’d had final say on the movie, in each iteration, as Juliana had pushed for an Emma character to be added.  _ The character has never worked without Emma, _ she’d insisted.  _ I’ve been puzzling through it for months _ . Regina had backed her up, had said  _ I wouldn’t be half the woman that I am without Emma Swan _ , and they’d stood firm together.

Emma had been cast, and a number of scenes shot again. The director had not been pleased with Regina, though neither of them cares very much about that. The less they see of most of these people, the better. “Hey,” Emma says suddenly. “Do you want to just…blow this whole thing off? We’ve made our appearance. We can always come back for the party.” 

Regina exhales. “I thought you’d never ask.” She looks around. “I just need to let my security team know–” 

“I still maintain that I’d do fine as your security team,” Emma mutters. What had seemed like such a good idea back when she and Regina had been fighting is now a drag when it’s Emma who’s being held down.

“You would not.” Regina slips her hand into Emma’s.

“No?” 

Regina smirks at her and leans in. “You’re far too easily distracted,” she murmurs, brushing her lips against Emma’s. It’s a happy little kiss, and Emma receives it gladly.

She’s learned to treasure each moment, to find value in even the tiniest of smiles, to bask in the peace of Regina by her side. She’s almost forty-one, and her life had begun at twenty-eight; and she has so little time to spare. She won’t overlook a second of it.

They haven’t discussed marrying. There is an understanding between them, borne by years of miserable marriages and of a missed chance that had lain before them on a wedding day years before. They don’t want or need another marriage, and there is commitment enough between them without it.

It had taken Emma long enough to be dragged back to Storybrooke– to relinquish her apartment and her job and her fading anonymity and to come home. And when she’d returned, she’d stared at the changed town where everyone knows her but no one stares– where she can manage the ever-growing security needs of a portal town and its residents– where she can spend lunch breaks ensconced in a reserved booth at Granny’s with Henry and see him every day– and she’d whispered one night to Regina,  _ I was so lonely _ , and Regina had stroked her side and said,  _ I know, darling, I know _ .

She’d had a childhood where she’d grasped at every bit of her life that had been worthwhile, and she’d fallen into it in adulthood, too, had clung to paintings and storybooks and refused to think about having anything more. Now, she has everything. She drowns in it sometimes, is so overwhelmed by it that she has to fight the rising fear that she might lose it all.

But it’s been six months, and she’s still there. Lucy’s paintings are on the walls of their house and Henry’s books are on the coffee table, and when everything gets to be too much, she can retreat to the sheriff’s station and close her eyes and breathe in the years of sweat and tears that had been her fight to get to this place. This is a gift, and she has been too long without it to fear it.

Regina is a gift, and she can’t live in fear anymore. 

They slip away to a coatroom and disappear to home, and Emma kicks off her heels and stretches out on her bed, pulling Regina down to her. “This is much more fun than a movie,” she says, sliding her arms along Regina’s legs to hitch up her dress. “If anyone asks, we’ll tell them we thought it was a revelation.”

Regina licks a trail up her neck, which has been nicely exposed by Emma’s strapless dress. “Absolutely orgasmic, or is that too on the nose?”

Emma sighs with pleasure. “I don’t even care.” 

The melancholy comes, as it does sometimes when she’s at her happiest, and Regina lifts her head up to frown at her. “What’s wrong?”

Emma shakes her head, lying back against the headboard for a moment. “If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be here with you…” She tangles her fingers into Regina’s hair. “I’d have thought you were lying. And I look back at a year ago and I’m furious at myself for waiting so long. We missed so much.”

Regina is quiet for a moment, her lips just brushing Emma’s nape. “A year ago, I was making a fool out of myself on that ridiculous street show in the hopes that I might bump into you sometime. You don’t have a monopoly on missed chances.”

Emma blinks. “Henry thought you liked that show,” she says. 

Regina lifts her head to give Emma an incredulous look. “I had to run an obstacle course once that involved climbing through a worm hole in a giant apple. The host once had me make suggestive puns to every person he stopped on Broadway. There was no part of that I enjoyed.”

“You did it twelve times.” 

Regina winces. “My condition was always that I picked the street and the time. I couldn’t believe it took so long.” 

Emma gapes at her, her eyes wide. “You looked like  _ such _ a dumbass,” she said. “Lucy and I watched all of your appearances back in March when you were on that trip to the Underworld. It was the best-worst thing I’d ever seen.” She takes a breath. “You did that twelve times. Just to bump into me?” 

“Not the best plan I’ve ever had,” Regina concedes. “But it worked, didn’t it?” She smiles, smug, and Emma is overcome with a new wash of fondness for the woman in front of her, good queen of the known universe, who’d found the single most humiliating way possible to find her again. 

  
“You absolute  _ dork _ . I love you,” she says fiercely, and she slips one hand behind Regina’s neck and another up Regina’s dress and surrenders to peaceful, tumultuous, perfect ecstasy.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear what you think!
> 
> Oh, and if you'd like to leave a tip, I'm always [here](https://coalitiongirl.tumblr.com/coffee) and very grateful! 😘


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